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Tarfumes.com - House of Leaves
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $13.57
Your Save: $ 6.38 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Pantheon
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ISBN: 0375703764
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 709
Publication Date: 2000-03-07
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: 2000-03-07
Studio: Pantheon
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Editorial Reviews:
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Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great start - dull end
Comment: I loved this book through the first 1/2 or 2/3 of it. Then it just started to ramble, like the author wasn't quite sure how or where to end it. Even the twist at the end couldn't make it worth it. It's too bad, because I thought it was a great premise and that he was doing some really interesting things.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I only finished it out of spite.
Comment: There are two stories presented in this book. Only one of them is interesting. The author's sister's album "Haunted" is amazingly good, which made it all the more mystifying why this book annoyed me so much. I only finished it out of spite.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Comment: Mesmerizing book. The style, the format, the writing, the dialogue on all levels keeps you glued to the pages. To coin a common phrase, "I couldn't put it down". Highly recommend.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not worth the hype
Comment: Hype:
1. Totally nonlinear
2. Postmodern
3. Psychological horror
4. Creative typography and text arrangement
Truth:
1. House of Leaves is surprisingly linear, albeit with parallel storylines. In each story, things happen in linear order; and, while you can start to get the idea that Zampano never existed by following them simultaneously, you would get that idea anyway by just reading Johnny's text. Neither the Zampano text nor the Johnny Truant text is a pleasure to read. Zampano's text is a mess of intentionally poor editing; footnotes that break the flow of narrative/discourse; and often multi-page, incredibly pointless, tangents. Johnny's text is, itself, a digression that interrupts and damages Zampano's text; but it's also its own story, so that can be excused. However, the frequent lack of punctuation and extremely train-of-thought style makes it read like a transcript of a 7th grader's video blog.
2. Yes, it is quite postmodern. From my experiences with attempts to be pomo, I have come to understand this to be a bad thing in so many ways...
3. It's really not all that spooky in any way. There is an element of angst to Johnny Truant, somewhat weakened by the two-page-long intentional-run-on, awful-to-read sentences; but the main text and the Navidson story is not very exciting. This is because...
4. 90% of the book is written like a bad LitCrit dissertation that hasn't been edited (or has been mangled in places, to make it annoying to read more than anything else). You can flip through and find the weird parts. They're cute, yet brief. The worst part are the footnotes. Half the story is in the footnotes, and they connect to the Zampano LitCrit dissertation crap in interesting ways... but having to go back and forth to footnotes constantly (and not in that fun _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_ way) makes it unpleasant to read, but in a conventional way (overused footnotes) rather than a pomo way (like the infrequent wacky text paralleling twisted or panicked storyline sections).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dull, boring, and who cares??
Comment: I really wanted to like this book. All the post-modern literary devices appeal to me, and I was looking forward to the creative typesetting, the story of Johnny Truant told in footnotes, all of it. I am the kind of reader who often finds myself up til the wee hours when I get engrossed in a book. I thought House of Leaves had the potential to be one of those books.
But as it turned out, all this book ever did was put me to sleep. Part of the problem was that the literary devices in this case really got in the way of the story. Being diverted from the narrative of the "main" story by a three-page footnote is disruptive to say the least. And when it happens every chapter, it just starts to get annoying. But the bigger problem for me was that I fundamentally didn't care about any of these characters. Johnny Truant was a compulsive liar with a crush on a stripper. Whoo-hoo. Zampano was hard for me to relate to, since more than half of his "work" was nothing more than fictional scholarly articles. The Navidsons, if we are to believe they were anything but a fiction created by Zampano, were shallow, self-absorbed people who I really couldn't feel much sympathy for. The only characters I ever cared about at all were Johnny's institutionalized mother, and Jed. Unfortunately, these characters only had small parts in the book. About halfway through the story (which was way earlier than halfway through the book), I started skipping the footnotes altogether. I really couldn't get into Johnny's story, because I just didn't care about him. All I wanted was to have the small satisfaction of finding out the end of the story about the house (it was disappointing), and then the greater satisfaction of returning this book to the library. I'm glad to be rid of it, and even more glad that I didn't waste any money on it.
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