House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
A boy named Johnny finds a bunch of papers in a dead man’s apartment. He puts them in order and discovers it’s a film review for a fictional film. Johnny copies down the story of Will Navidson who lived in a house that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. A mysterious hallway appears in
Navidon’s
h o u s e
and he goes d
o
w
n
the hallway
and
there’s
n o t h i n g
there.
People die. The hallway is evil. Or is it? What is the hallway? Who is the hallway?
Nobody cares except Johnny because drugs.(1)
(1) Also footnotes
“Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.”
—House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
—Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
—Mark Z. Danielewski, from House of Leaves (Pantheon Books, 2000)
mark z. danielewski
SnowingSnowing - Mark Z. Danielewski
Tell Mitch I suck, tell Mitch I’m sorry. I hope that Boston Isn’t awful and that Canada’s the same.
