Re-reading the 90s: House of Leaves

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now. House of Leaves only qualifies on a technicality, since it was originally published in 2000. However, there was an earlier hypertext version ontline. This post contains spoilers.

What I Remember

House of Leaves is an impressive-looking book – partly for its size, and partly for the typographical tricks it uses. It’s one of the scariest books I’ve read, but in places reading it felt like a trudge.

The book covers multiple storylines. There is the account of Johnny Truant, who discovers a set of notes made by a blind academic about a documentary that does not exist. Then there is the story of the documentary, about a photojournalist with a problem – the inside of his house seems to be expanding. I clearly remember scenes about exploring the house, and the awful scale of it. Then there are the Whalestone letters, sent between a mother and her son, which I never really placed alongside the rest of it.

House of Leaves is a postmodern classic. It’s a novel whose textual games drive the plot forward. It’s an elegant horror novel. But, in re-reading I’d like to have a clearer idea of how all the elements hung together.

What it was like

House of Leaves was as great as I remember. It infiltrated my dreams, and I’d find myself inside buildings which were larger than they ought to be. I’ve never had such awful nightmares from a book. The dark warnings about obsession with the Navidson record turned out to be true. This is a book so metafictional that it leaked into my life.

The text has mostly aged well although the scenes with Johnny Truant sometimes grate in their treatment of the female characters. Truant’s narration is one of the book’s weakest points, although it would not work without that layer of framing. Related to the issues around misogyny, it’s notable how the book’s references to Harvey Weinstein now take on a different tone.

The main text of the book works incredibly well, with its dense academic critiques of a movie that does not exist. The labyrinth of the footnotes was effective, using every typographic trick it could.

The thing I found most frustrating with House of Leaves were the texts that followed the main story. The Pelican Poems seemed indulgent, a poetic sequence originally written by Danielewski while travelling in Europe. The Whalestoe letters provide context for Johnny Truant, as well as leading to some fascinating theories about who wrote the text – but it just felt like a party that had gone on too long.

Will this book survive to become a classic? Maybe some of the references to real people will fade, but there is possibly enough to carry this book far into the future. And I can imagine a new edition, published in the 22nd century, with an additional layer of annotation, both explaining the references and making the book darker.

I read House of Leaves alongside my friend Katharine – we have a little 90’s book club between the two of us. It was great to have her responses as a newcomer. There’s a joy to sharing a book with someone else that, these days, is all too often missing. House of Leaves promotes such interactions. In the same way that Truant found himself connecting to people to investigate the original text, Danielewski’s novel pushes people into investigating it – through discussions online, or Katharine’s colleague recognising the book when she had it at work and stopping to talk about it.

I can imagine reading House of Leaves again in the 2030’s, and getting just as rich an experience from it.

Story: A Slice of Heaven on Earth (audio)

I’ve recorded a new story that I wrote last month, A Slice of Heaven on Earth. It’s part of my ongoing series of South Downs Way stories, and is about how the Devil loves parties at village halls.

I’m currently working on two new South Downs Way pamphlets for this year: Once Upon a Time in Brighton and Hove, and Stories of Imaginary Sussex Folklore. This piece won’t appear in either of those, but will probably emerge in the pamphlet I’m working on for 2024. This is a long project…

Monthnotes: January 2023

January has been an unobtrusive month, as shown by how few photographs I’ve taken. I started the new year with my friend Lizi and an appalling migraine. I visited Blackpool for a weekend with Muffy in between strikes, and went to the Midlands for my Dad’s birthday. Much of the remaining time was spent hibernating. Hebden Bridge weather is as intense as I was promised, with more snow making the pavements treacherous for a week.

My work project continues to be tough. I can feel myself responding to the stress, particularly with weird dreams and disrupted sleep patterns. But this is the job I want to be doing, and I’m OK with where things are for the moment. Enduring a stressful project seems a little harder with remote working and not having all those friendly, informal interactions with colleagues. I should have had a visit to London at the end of the month to meet my team in person, but that was cancelled due to train strikes.

I walked about 288,000 steps last month, an average of 9,287 a day. My Fitbit lost a few day’s totals, which is frustrating. My highest count was for a hike with some colleagues from the Manchester branch of my company. I also had a decent hike with Commoner’s Choir the day after their Hebden Bridge gig – that walk should be featured on one of Clare Balding’s Ramblings show in February. I’ve not been eating particularly healthily, although things are improving. I put on a couple of pounds, which I am going to try and remove in the next couple of months.

I’ve done very little decent writing this month – again, due to work. I did write a couple of pieces for the Wednesday Writers, which I was fairly happy with. I need to get both of them posted online, I think. I’m waiting on a review of the next South Downs Way volume, and working away at another one, due for release in the summer.

I’ve got my reading under a little more control recently, including catching up on a lot of zines (Hwaet continues to be essential reading). I enjoyed the McSweeny’s retrospective, which contained a great deal of detail about publishing. Girlfriend in a Coma was an interesting re-read, although I didn’t like it so much this time round. I also caught up on The Constant Gardener, a post-Cold War Le Carre book that I’d missed at the time. Joe Hill’s short story Pop Art (from his collection 20th Century Ghosts) was sad and well written, using a weird concept, (a child is friends with an inflatable boy) and taking it very seriously.

The TV highlight this month was Atlanta, which concluded with another weird and uncompromising season – one of the best shows I’ve seen in some time. I also finished Andor, which was well made, but I don’t really see the point in ‘Star Wars for adults’. I watched the first episode of The Last of Us, and found it too faithful to the video game – like a very expensive Twitch stream. I might have watched more, but NowTV’s ads are increasingly intrusive. It amazes me that paying to see a TV show gives a worse experience than pirating it. I’ve also been watching The Rig as background. Very sad to hear that Netflix cancelled 1899 – although I would still have watched the first season if I’d known what its fate would be.

I watched several films over the month. The most inventive was One Cut of the Dead, which used its low budget for a brilliant concept. Smile and Knives Out were slick without quite grabbing me. I enjoyed Glorious for its high-concept plot about a haunted glory-hole – and making a spirited attempt at living up to that. Bodies Bodies Bodies was fantastic, telling its story about murder in a mansion flawlessly. I also tried watching The Lighthouse which seems like a good film, but did not work for me.

One of my aims for 2023 is to listen to more new music, rather than the same 90s hits I’ve been playing for years. I’ve managed to find some great new music, notably- Ethel Caine’s Preacher’s Daughter album. Spotify has played several songs by Samia, but it was only when the album Honey emerged I realised these songs came from the same artist. I’ve also enjoyed tracks by Vot and Lizzie McAlpine; a new Princess Superstar record; and Caroline Rose’s haunting single Miami. Not bad for the first month.

My musical explorations were helped by new chart podcast Pop Could Never Save Us. Episode 1 looked at a recent UK top 5 and it turned out to be pretty good. The hosts provide interesting context – I now know how the SP1200 sampler led to the Wu-Tang production style. Escapism was a catchy and clever number one, and Messy in Heaven and the new SZA single were also worth listening to. Episode 2 featured a review of a 1959 chart, which included a digression into skiffle’s origins. I’m hoping this makes a good replacement for The Content Mines, which ended its regular run this month. I’m going to miss it.

As work has taken over my life, I’ve had less focus on British politics – probably a good thing. The little I have seen supports the feeling that Britain is falling apart through underinvestment and corruption. It just doesn’t feel like there’s much hope, and I can’t see Labour offering enough compelling reasons for people to vote against the government. There’s none of the rising optimism I remember from New Labour’s ascendency, no feeling that things can get better.

Writing up these notes, I can see how much work has loomed over January. Things are improving, but if I have another month like this then I am going to look at moving to another project.