House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Sorry horror fans, this book is not getting a good grade from me. My book club picked it initially because it had rave reviews for its deep layers of meaning and subtle scariness. Everything in the book including the formatting was supposed to make a reader feel claustrophobic, but it fell flat for me (I’m an obvious kind of person). I barely made it into the second chapter. It was a lot less disorienting than White Is for Witching, but it was so slow and unsatisfying as it went that we got impatient with it and dropped it.

The opening had a guy saying he was a crazy hermit because of a book (or a movie? a book about a movie?) and how its subject didn’t exist. Obviously he was meant to be an unreliable narrator, and the bait to get the readers interested in the novel. However, because he didn’t even know what he was talking about, the bait was unappealing.

Once we started reading The Navidson Record (the book which drove him crazy), it describes a film about a family with interesting backstories; I kind of found the backstories to be done already in movies like Paranormal Activity where the mom was a supermodel turned housewife and had all the frustrations that went along with that transition, and Dad was a director trying to settle down and “get away from it all” and so they bought a creepy house. However, the plot was too slow to get me interested in the movie the book was describing.

Also, this formatting. Wtf.

The plot was so slow I finally looked up the ending to see if it would be interesting to keep going on. For me, it wasn’t; I’m not telling you to look up spoilers, but I’m just saying that it saved me a lot of time. When I read a book like that, I don’t care about spoilers and surprise endings, but I do care about how well the author twists the novel to make the surprise ending worth it. For example, (and here’s an old spoiler here that I presume you’ve heard of but don’t read on if you care) in The Sixth Sense, I knew the ending before I saw the actual movie, but I still wanted to see it because I wanted to evaluate how well M. Night Shyamalan hid the fact that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. 

Other 'surprise' endings just feel flat to me, like the writers threw it in just to end the story. An example is The Forgotten. God, I hated that movie.

Don't recommend that, either.

While I don’t think House of Leaves was like that (the author definitely had that ending in mind when he was writing it) I still don’t think the ending was worth going reading all that confusing crap to get to it. 

In conclusion, I quit House of Leaves because I was bored and confused. I would not recommend it. If someone feels otherwise and gave it the time, I'd appreciate hearing why they loved it! 

Goodreads link