I read this book on holiday in 2025, and felt compelled to write about it, even though my thoughts will most likely not be original.
The book in brief
House of Leaves is a lengthy horror story written by Mark Z. Danielewski in the year 2000.
It has multiple different narrators and somewhat parallel stories going at the same time:
- the kind of framing device of Johnny Truant
- “The Navidson Record” - a fictional documentary film about people living in a perculiar house, as described by a pseudo-academic paper analysing it. This is the source of the majority of the horror in the book
- letters from Johnny’s mother, Pelafina
Also included are some strange pieces of visual art and poems, some of which are relevant for my interpretation of events.
Due to the intertwining writing of the book, it’s difficult to lay my thoughts out in a strictly linear fashion, but I will try my best.
This post will contain spoilers for the nearly 30 year old book.
Johnny
Johnny is effectively our first entry into the book.
His story is that his father is dead, and his mother is in an asylum. He lives in Los Angeles, perhaps Hollywood, and is a drug addict. One of his friends helps look after an apartment complex, and in that complex lives an old eccentric gentleman, who it turns out is blind. The gentleman dies, and Johnny helps to investigate the apartment (before the police). In the apartment, he finds that the windows are covered with paper glued on, and that underneath the man’s corpse there are some claw marks as if they had been carved into the floor by a monster. He also finds dotted all over the apartment, scrawled on varying types of paper (some typewritten, some handwritten, some on normal paper, some on napkins, some stored in the fridge, some in a chest etc) the titular book.
The remainder of the rest of the book is meant to have been pieced together from these random, disparate bits of paper.
At some points throughout the book, Johnny will interject through a footnote. A lot of these are excessively long (some are up to 13 pages, if I recall correctly). They are also pretty unpleasant. There is a degree of horror, but a lot of it just comes across as pathetic incel fantasy.
For example, there will be a phrase in German. Rather than translating it, there will be a multiple page story about how Johnny tracked down an engaged woman who spoke German, got her to translate it, and then had sex with her.
This happens repeatedly, and it makes Johnny (and the people he gets to have affairs with him) as utterly reprehensible, and perhaps even he’s an unreliable narrator.
Hell, at a point much later on, one of those women who consensually slept with him gets her fiance to attack him. Johnny is, at this point, malnourished and frail, yet manages to severely beat the much larger and less frail man.
This is ludircous.
Going back a bit, eventually Johnny’s sanity slips - he starts getting nightmares, and seems to be attacked by monsters in reality. At one point as he’s coming out of the breakdown, he meets a band that were singing a song about events in the book. When talking to them, it turns out that they’ve read the completed book (including Johnny’s footnotes, which Johnny hasn’t finished compiling) on the internet.
This is, of course, completely impossible. (1)
It’s also in that section that it explicitly points out that the book contains hidden messages throughout (think, read the first letter of each sentence type of thing).
The Navidson Record
This is the main prose of the book, but we experience it indirectly. Our experience of this is through the pseudo-academic paper written by Zampanò
I say “pseudo-academic” because whilst it takes the style of an academic paper (not dissimilar to my Philosophy dissertation) but by the nature of the story, it was never submitted to any sort of academic authority.
It should also be noted that it is explicitly stated in the Johnny prose that this film that is being analysed never existed. It is, within Johnny’s universe, fictional. (2)
The documentary is about a pulitzer-prize winning photographer, Navidson. He is somewhat estranged from his family, so he buys a house that they all move into. He sets up a series of cameras throughout the house to document his attempts at reconcilliation.
After the family return from a friend’s wedding, they find that there is an additional door in their bedroom. The cameras verify that no-one entered the house to install it, it just appeared. The door opens to a short corridor, the walls made up of a charcoal-esque substance (later this gets tested to confirm that it is older than the solar system), the other side opening into the children’s bedroom.
Navidson’s brother, who is an architect, gets involved to double check Navidson’s measurements. It turns out that the outside of the house is smaller than the inside of the house by the size of the corridor (so, if the corridor is 3 feet wide, the inside of the house is 3 feet wider than the outside). After a lot of double checking, the problem is resolved, but now in the other horizontal axis, the house is a foot wider than it was a few minutes before (as measured by a tight fitting bookcase).
Eventually, a door appears in the lounge, against an external wall. The door should open directly into the garden, but instead opens into another corridor that is about 10 feet long.
At one point there is an extremely lengthy section delving into the science of echoes, eventually culminating in the assurance that for a room to have an echo it must be over 60 feet long (maybe not exactly 60, I’m going by memory). This is swiftly followed by Navidson hearing the echoes of his children’s voices coming from the corridor.
There are a few expeditions into the corridor, accompanied by professional explorers (who go insane and try to kill the others), and strange events, such as:
- Rooms that change size on the fly
- Noises that accompany those changes
- A staircase that changes in height (at one point they measure it by how long a coin takes to drop, concluding that it is deeper than the diameter of the Earth)
- Claw marks as if there is a monster (3)
- Noises that might be a monster but might also be the rooms moving
After one of the last expeditions, Navidson and his family escape from the house, but his brother is swallowed by a sudden hole opening up in the kitchen, presumably killing him. (4)
Navidson eventually returns to the house to do a solo expedition, and at that point the book itself becomes strange. For example, there is a hole in a wall. That is represented in the book by a square in the page (and many subsequent ones) with text “through” it, like looking into another room through a hole in the wall. Gravity changes, so the text is upside-down or on it’s side. Corridors get narrow, so there is less text on the page. (5)
Navidson eventually escapes, but loses limbs and an eye in the process. It’s sort of a happy ending, with some sacrifices, as if it was some sort of Biblical trial.
Pelafina
Johnny’s mum’s story is told through letters she wrote (and apparently in another book, that I may eventually read).
She is in an asylum. Apparently when Johnny was young, she tried to scald him with a pan, which led to Johnny’s father having her committed.
These letters are even more difficult to comprehend than the rest of the story, but I particularly remember one which was presented as if it were random ravings without whitespace. Whilst reading that it looked as if there was meant to be a hidden message saying “He Knew”.
Her ending is not so pleasant - this section ends with a note that she died, and Johnny picked up what little personal effects she had.
However, through Johnny’s prose he concludes that she didn’t actually try to harm him, and instead was trying to protect him from the pan.
Conclusion
It was an entertaining book, but really really really dragged at times (probably intentionally). I certainly didn’t enjoy it enough to try to pour over it to find hidden codes (plus, I already have too many other obesessions to spend my time on).
I hated Johnny, which is probably what paints my theory as to what the truth is.
In terms of scariness, it was genuinly distrubing… at first. Like many horror films, as it goes on it becomes less scary as you go on, which is a damned shame.
It tries to make up for it, by having the book itself get strange at the end when it’s less scary, but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to me. (5)
I can appreciate the depiction of mental health, and the fear of mental illness being genetic. That is something very close to my heart, especially over the last few years.
Other people’s theories
There are a lot of fans out there with various theories. Whilst reading I did do some searching and there were some instances of people going wild with ideas that just seemed to be borne of ignorance of specific subjects.
I can’t remember which in particular I’m thinking of, but there was at least one.
There is a lot of reading to be done on the official forums, but the links on the post go to the wrong top-level-domain. This would be easy to fix so that I could read those threads if I wanted to, which I don’t.
One common one is that the book is itself the house. Leaves of paper. Pages of a book. The strange labyrinthian layout.
My theory
This is my theory, and this theory is mine:
It’s all fictional.
Well, obviously. It’s a fiction book. But it’s also fictional within the universe of the book itself.
Part of the book goes into detail about the Minotaur, particularly a theory that the Minotaur was actually the illegitimate son of the king of Minos. When the Minotaur was slayed, the king wept, but according to that theory they weren’t tears of joy. In that section Zampanò mentions that he wish he could have had a son, and that if he had he would be flawed. (3) He would face challenges, but would have a happy ending, and it is also somehat implied that he would have a lot of sex.
Johnny has a lot of sex in the book, and his narrative is both improbable and impossible(1)
The film doesn’t exist (2). In fact, in the collages at the end of the book, there is an exerpt showing an alternate ending to the expedition where Navidson’s children die, rather than his brother. (4)
Zampanò didn’t tap into an alternate reality to see the film, it was purely an invention of his own mind.
The film was invented by Zampanò, because he wanted a son. Johnny is his wish-fullfilment, fictional child that he never could have.
What about his mother, then? Whilst there is another book which goes into detail about her life, I am at the moment convinced that she is also fictional, purely because I am convinced Johnny is.