Transcript
Speaker: Hello listeners, we wanted to let you know that we will be spoiling House of Leaves and any of the other books we have discussed on this podcast. Also, there may be some discussion of topics inappropriate for children or the workplace, so you might want to listen with headphones.
Speaker: Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceive them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. Old shelters, televisions, magazines, movies, won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even the margins of this book.
Speaker: That's when you'll discover that you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. You'll care only about the darkness, and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe -appointed sentinel.
Speaker: as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials. Fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
Speaker: And then the nightmares will begin. Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today we are discussing House of Leaves by Mark C. Danielewski. This is our final book discussion for season one and it's a doozy. I'm Carly and I love the puzzles in this book. This is our final book discussion for season one. Buckle in everyone. This is going to be a long and involved discussion.
Speaker: I'm Caroline and this book left me literally disoriented and dizzy thanks to the unusual formatting choices, which we'll describe later. So House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is at least two stories in one, if not more. It contains the Navidston record, which is the story of a haunted house belonging to Will and Karen Navidson in the late 80s.
Speaker: Will, also called Navi, is a famous photojournalist who documents his haunted house with video cameras placed throughout the living areas. He and Karen also provide video diaries. The story, the Navison Record, is written down by Zampano, a blind old man who dies in mysterious circumstances.
Speaker: Zampano's manuscript is found by a man named Johnny Truant, who leaves in footnotes his story of finding the manuscript and his gradual descent into madness as a result of reading the manuscript.
Speaker: So Zompineau's manuscript is about the Navieson record, or rather about Will Navieson's videos about the haunted house. This manuscript is presented as a summary of the Navieson record, which includes numerous videos of the occurrences released over a few years in the early 90s, which generated substantial academic and popular interest. He cites to, for example,
Speaker: analyses of the echo, riddles, and the minotaur, all of which is supposed to be parroting academic analyses. For example, there's a two and a half page footnote listing other photographers, just listing them, to show allegedly that Will's photography is unique. Or, for example, there's a citation to an article titled The Fracturing of the American Family attached to dialogue where Will and Karen mildly disagree about something.
Speaker: At the beginning of the book in 1996, Zampano is found dead, allegedly of natural causes in his apartment. There are deep scratches in the wood beside his dead body and stretched out tape measures nailed to the walls in order to measure whether the walls have shifted.
Speaker: Johnny Truant, a friend of Zampano's neighbor, enters and takes the manuscript, which is in various pages in a black trunk. Johnny Truant then spends months piecing the manuscript together and adding his own notations on top of Zampano's notations. The Navitsyn Record
Speaker: Will and Karen and their two children move into their house. Soon thereafter they discover a new closet where before there had only been a blank wall. When Will investigates he finds that the internal measurements of the house are somehow larger than the external measurements. Then a dark cold hallway opens in the exterior living room. Will enters the space once and finds a hallway stretching for five and a half minutes. He records this on video. Will then assembles a team consisting of
Speaker: Holloway, a sort of big game hunter, Ruston, a structural engineer who is wheelchair bound, and Jed and Wax to mountain climbers. They then make a series of expeditions into the hallway. Will does not enter the hallway at Karen's insistence. Tom also does not enter. And to clarify, Tom is Will's brother, who they have been somewhat estranged, but Tom comes to help when the haunted hallway is discovered.
Speaker: So there's then a series of explorations by this core team of Holloway, Reston, Jed, and Wax. In the first exploration, they enter the hallway, which keeps going, expands and opens up, and they journey for an hour, eventually finding a large space at least 200 feet high. On the second exploration, they journey for eight hours.
Speaker: using fishing line flares and neon markers to mark their path so they can get back. The third exploration is 20 hours long. The team begins to experience vertigo as directions shift and unexpected spaces open up around them. For the fourth exploration, the team descends for hundreds or maybe thousands of feet. The dark and cold appear to drive Holloway mad and he starts shooting. He kills Jed and gravely injures Wax.
Speaker: The survivors knock on the walls, which the Navissans somehow hear in the house. At that point, the team has been gone seven days. So here in the novel, the formatting of the text changes. There are odd ellipses and paragraph breaks. At one point, several thousand words about the Minotaur are crossed out in red, but still legible. Will Tom and Reston enter the dark hallway to rescue the team?
Speaker: Tom remains at the top of the stairway and Will follows the markers left by the others, who he eventually finds. They begin lifting the injured and resten up a pulley to get to the top of the stairs. When Will is the only one left at the bottom, the stairway stretches, pulling the rope beyond Will's grasp.
Speaker: He notices a coin drop that was a signal from Tom that the last person Reston had reached the top of the staircase. The penny takes 45 minutes to fall, meaning it fell 54 ,454 miles, which is larger than the circumference of the earth. Here, the book must be rotated to be read, imitating the snapping and twirling of the rope. It is disorienting to read.
Speaker: Tom and the others exit the hallway, Will remains there for four more days.
Speaker: Once Will manages to return, the family begins packing to leave immediately. But the house begins moving. It begins shearing and snapping, nearly killing Karen in the bedroom. Will gets her out, then returns for Daisy, the daughter. Tom, his brother, has gotten to her first and passes Daisy out of the kitchen window to Will. But every time Tom tries to leave, the house pulls him back in. Eventually, the house
Speaker: is described as sort of leaping out at Tom and chopping off his hands, which are outstretched towards Will, and then the house consumes Tom in a black void. Karen and the children go to stay with her mother. Will stays with Reston near the house for six months, editing the tapes and mourning his brother. Then he decides to re -enter the house.
Speaker: He wanders in darkness and cold and disorienting space for a month. Before his last match runs out, he uses the last one to read a book called House of Leaves. During this time, Karen returns to the house and as she waits, a void opens up in a wall and Karen steps through it for the first time entering these black haunted spaces within the house. She finds Will.
Speaker: He loses a hand and an ear to Frostbite as well as one eye and has a crushed hip, but otherwise he survives and they all flee the house. So Johnny Truin's story throughout, he recounts his piecing together of Zampano's manuscript, his one night stands, his drug use, and his gradual descent into madness. He feels hunted by the darkness, by the house.
Speaker: He describes his obsession with a stripper he calls Thumper, nights out partying with his friend Ludo, and he reveals that he's a talented storyteller, and his mother was committed when he was seven years old, and his father died in a car accident a couple years later.
Speaker: He also had an abusive father at the age of 13, so he ran away to Alaska to work in a fish processing plant. As Johnny gets more involved with the manuscript, he starts to lose track of time. He blocks all light and sound from his room, imitating zimpano.
Speaker: He becomes afraid of the dark. He loses his job at a tattoo parlor. He gives up drugs and alcohol. At the end of the book, Johnny Truett goes to find the Navidson house, which he's unable to find, and then seeks his child at home, which has been torn down. He returns to California and finally connects with Thumper, though they have both changed a lot. The last journal entries from Johnny are out of order, and Johnny admits that some of them are made up, possibly all of them.
Speaker: In August 1999, Johnny recounts that he entered a bar where the band was playing a song titled Five and a Half Minute Hallway. The band tells him that it's from the book House of Leaves by Johnny Truant and give him a copy of his own book. The story mostly ends on that note. We will note that there's some additional material at the end of the book, some appendices that allegedly contain material provided by Zampano,
Speaker: and additional material related to Johnny Truant's childhood that was not included in the main book of House of Leaves. And we did this just to try to limit the discussion, frankly, because there was so much just in House of Leaves proper that it
Speaker: it seemed like a good idea to just, for now, cut out those appendices. So, the opening question. To me, the question that really stands out with this book, how does one discuss this novel when it contains what feels like every possible interpretation?
Speaker: So it seems like Daniel Uski has given us some phenomena, the house, and then there's just a buffet of possible interpretations. And obviously there are some that appealed to me and I think some that appealed to you, Carly, but how do we know the interpretations that appeal to us are the right ones? Or how do we even talk about a book like this when he provides all possible interpretations?
Speaker: I think we talk about what we want to talk about. I mean, I don't know that we have to structure or limit our conversation more than we usually do. I think in one of our previous discussions, we talked about a book being a Rorschach test, Abigail Lane maybe, because there were so many different stories and we just kind of talked about the stories that appealed to us most and we just picked out what appealed to us most. So I think that's fine.
Speaker: I think there's so much provided in this story, and I wonder if part of it is meant to be ignored, especially it's throughout the story. So first of all, in the in the very introduction where we learn about Johnny discovering the trunk full of these notes and scribbles and which he assembles into the manuscript, he says he tries to fact check some of the stuff he finds. Like there's one section that's quoting it. So apparently Karen went and interviewed
Speaker: public figures and got these interviews on video. And Johnny tried to reach out to those public figures and they had never heard of the Navidson record. And he could find no confirmation that the Navidson record actually existed, which means that all of the academic articles and other resources cited in Zampano's text could not possibly exist because the Navidson record did not exist. So that was the first clue of like,
Speaker: we shouldn't take it too seriously because it doesn't exist. Well, I mean, that's true for any book, right? So what do you do with that? I still kind of have the same question. There were sections in here that appealed to me more than others, but I, you know, this book came from one person's mind, right? Even though it doesn't seem like it, because it quotes probably more than a thousand different people all commenting on the same story.
Speaker: this is all the product of one person's mind and to me that suggests there's a singular way to understand it maybe that's not true maybe it's irrelevant that it comes from one mind so would you agree that johnny is sort of the avatar for our author maybe because he is responding to and reacting to
Speaker: the Navidson record. And it felt like sometimes he's supposed to be a stand -in for us as readers, because he communicates directly with us as readers, too. I think he is supposed to be a stand -in for the readers. I would imagine Daniel Uski, the actual author, is much more like Zampano, just given that Zampano also loved all these citations and
Speaker: you know academic nonsense that wouldn't be in this book if the author himself didn't like that as well right sure i can't talk about the footnotes without like getting into the formatting because i think it's very connected so let's just go through the different formatting that happens and it was really cool oh man i forgot to find the spot there's
Speaker: The citations definitely help interpret the story of both Johnny and the Navidson. So my first clue was pretty early. It must have been in chapter seven. There was some quote from someone about using the film to like the physical experience of filmmaking is to make your viewers experience or have some sort of emotional response. That's part of the story. And so that was the first clue of like, oh, here's what's happening with the formatting here.
Speaker: So, it gets weird in Chapter 8. There are these strange paragraph breaks. They're not like logical breaks in the paragraph. Sometimes they're in the middle of sentences. And they're broken up by these dots. And the dots make a pattern of three solid dots and then one circle, which is a symbol for SOS. And that's the chapter where
Speaker: the family hears SOS knocking on their walls. And that's when they get a clue that Holloway, Wax and Jed need help. And so that's when Navidson decides to like go and rescue them. So that was cool. Like, oh, we're hearing this, like SOS and it's an interrupting your reading as if knocking on the wall is interrupting you during the day, right? So then chapter nine, the footnotes split off into ridiculously impossible lists. Like you mentioned one in the summary,
Speaker: a list of photographers. I think there's a list of directors and then another one of the lists is a list, I think of everything you would find in the structure of a home, like it lists insulation, lumber, but with very granular detail, the brand name of whatever this insulation is. Imagine trying to enumerate everything that goes into the walls of a home, it's quite lengthy.
Speaker: as you're reading and then you get interrupted by this footnote and it becomes apparent that the footnote is a bunch of nonsense and like I obviously didn't sit there and read a list of hundreds of names and hundreds of like I glanced over each section of it but like yeah I wasn't reading it carefully but that was the section where Will and Reston are searching through these hallways and the hallways keep splitting out
Speaker: And I really felt this irritation of, do I need to go down this path and read this footnote or not? I have to check and just to make sure that I'm not missing anything. And then I have to go back. And it's delaying the story. And I found myself frustrated with like, get on with the story. And I was like, oh, OK, I get it. I'm experiencing the frustration of trying to search these infinite expanding halls and rooms.
Speaker: That is a great connection. I did not realize that. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it continued for me. Like we have Tom at the top of this impossibly high staircase in a giant room waiting. He's like relaying the radio. He has a radio so he can communicate with Will and Reston at the bottom of the staircase. Some description of what's happening with Karen inside the real house. And so it's split off into these short paragraphs where there's a lot of white space on the page.
Speaker: and sections of the story talking about Karen in the house or Tom at the top of the stairwell or at the top of the page, and then the story about, the paragraphs about Will and Reston at the bottom of the scare case are at the bottom of the page. And also I was wondering if like, if those pages where there's only like one short paragraph of a few lines, did that make you read more slowly? Like, were you considering those paragraphs more carefully? I'm not sure, but I know
Speaker: that there was a moment of empty space as I scanned the page and didn't see anything, right? So even though you look at the page and you know, okay, this is like 90 % empty, it still takes a moment to look and take that in. And then you're sort of aware
Speaker: of time, right? Like here's, it's an empty page, sort of an empty second looking at it. And then you move on. So it didn't, I didn't consciously linger, but it made me more aware of time, I guess, and space also, obviously.
Speaker: At one point, I did, I was like, maybe it was when it first started happening, I was like, this paragraph must be important to get a whole page to itself. But then I just moved more quickly because it was a lot. All this formatting stuff is happening right when the story is in some way at its most intense, right? Yeah. You know, when they're lost down there, they're
Speaker: being chased by hallway or, you know, Tom and Will have gone in to rescue the others. I at least was like, eager to see what happened, right? I wasn't just sitting there appreciating, oh, this is a new formatting experience. I was like, we got somewhere to go. Let's get there.
Speaker: Yeah. And it doesn't like, I definitely felt that, that tension and that annoyance that we weren't just getting to the story, but I think it was very effective. Right. Cause there's prior to this, there's a lot of academic language that you can interesting quotes translated from many other languages and things like that, that you can really linger over.
Speaker: really take your time with and think about. But once the story heats up, I guess you're thrown more in the middle of it. And so these formatting changes have a stronger effect than if the weird formatting had been done. For example, in the chapter that just talks about echoes. It's a very intellectual conversation. I think some people would maybe find it slow. I found parts of it interesting, but that's just presented in your standard format.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's I think it's very deliberate to make you appreciate the action of the story at that point. Yeah. Yeah. And then in that chapter, that's when Holloway finds finds them and and manages to hit Jed right in the head and kills him instantly. And there's like
Speaker: sentences where it's just one line of text across many pages. And sometimes the words are spaced out even more, which felt like a slow motion shot. Like if you were watching it on film, it would be slow motion, you would see the bullet moving. Yeah, so I thought that was pretty effective too.
Speaker: And then you described they make it to the staircase and get wax and Jed up. And then Reston is being hauled up on a pulley with his wheelchair. And then the staircase stretches. And then the text is like moving and swirling and stretching and turning upside down. And also at some point in here when the rope snaps, you have to physically turn the book to be able to read the text.
Speaker: and it gives a sense of disorientation. I guess the effect is you're trying so hard to follow the story and you're so focused on that because it's interesting what's happening that first of all, you're willing to quickly turn the book around and try to figure out what happens. But the very fact that you're so interested kind of throws you through these formatting changes and lets them have a bigger effect on you, which is really very clever.
Speaker: Yeah. The action gets interrupted by a long exploration of Tom and Will's relationship. They're twin brothers and they're compared to Jacob and Esau. And those chapters are split into two columns, which I didn't get until I was rewriting this all together in the notes. And I was like, two columns, two columns, two columns. Oh, Jacob and Esau. Oh, twins. Oh, that's why I did this because it's twins.
Speaker: But I didn't get that in the moment. And then chapter 13 is split into three different sections and one section about Holloway. So they do find tape of Holloway like even though he split off from the group and was kind of going mad and like possibly hallucinating them as as monsters and so had a gun and that's why he was shooting at them.
Speaker: And he records some of that, and actually his own suicide is recorded on the tape. But in that section about that piece of tape, we get a footnote from Johnny saying that the pages had these little ash burns, like there had been a fire, hot ash landed on these pages and burned these tiny little holes.
Speaker: And it meant that there were some like letters missing in words, which you could still read like your brain does fill in the blanks. But that was hard. Like it felt like stuttering to me like my own reading was stuttering. Yeah, that was interesting because the only way I could read it continuously, you know, without having to stop and
Speaker: Figure out what each word went in was to sort of step back mentally and try to read a whole paragraph at a time and with that space i found that my brain did a better job of quickly filling in the letters but me doing that created again a sensation of distance from.
Speaker: the content. And I don't know what to make of that. Maybe it was just meant that Holloway had such an extreme experience. We can't understand it. Maybe it was such an intense experience. It was just like for the reader's protection, we're going to, at Danielewski, sort of obscured a little bit of it. I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah. No, I like that. Stepping back to get a clearer picture. That's really interesting. Yeah. But also having to do it quickly. So it wasn't like a, you know, sat and really examine this. It was like, oh, if I'm going to understand it, I got to keep moving mentally at least.
Speaker: So then we get many chapters, you know, after they escape the house and Tom is, is taken and they're dealing with that and the family may be splitting permanently. And then Will goes back into the hallway and we get new formatting, sort of repetition of the earlier formatting as they're going up and down, but then it's, Will is experiencing the expanding and contracting of the hallway.
Speaker: the changing of directions and so we get a lot more different text experimentation, you know, different paragraph lengths and sizes and then a tightening as it's like he's crawling into like a snail shell. There was a previous chapter that talked a lot about snail shells and that spiral and so Will is crawling and crawling and gets smaller and tighter
Speaker: and then the text gets smaller and tighter as well until he finds himself in a free fall. No floor, no sense of direction. At one point he lights a flare and drops it and it goes up at another time it floats with him and then another time it goes down at a high speed.
Speaker: Like he doesn't even have like there's no gravity, there's no wind, there's no light. He's sort of like complete sensory deprivation. He's able to light matches occasionally. And then we learn he has a book with him called House of Leaves. And that for me was the most disorienting moment of the story. Like, yes, I mean, there were lots of disorienting moments. But that was really strange because
Speaker: House of Leaves has never been mentioned in this book prior to that. But also, we've had all these footnotes examining every aspect of the story, but there's never been any discussion of leaves. Right. Of any kind. Right? Right. So yeah, it was really startling.
Speaker: No, I'm glad you pointed that out because we should expect many different footnotes talking about why Will brought that book in with him, you know, why it's so important. It's his last connection. And it was really interesting that he's so fully alone.
Speaker: And I think that's related to the family dynamics that maybe we can talk about. But so fully alone, he's nothing to look at. They talk about in many different sections of how the darkness of the room and the size of the room, it hurts your eyes or it gives you vertigo, like rest and experiences, seasickness, because there's nothing to look at. And even in the film when Zampano is describing the screening of this part of the film,
Speaker: it's six minutes of black and you hear Will mumbling or singing or talking to himself. And the people in the theater are described as looking at the exit sign just as a break from the blackness. So the idea that in this sensory deprivation,
Speaker: Well, he has to escape his present moment into a book. And we don't know if the book is fiction or nonfiction, but then he has to burn the pages of the book so he can continue reading. And he has to speed along getting to, to get ahead of the burning that's providing him light too. I don't know. It was just such a strange thing. And it goes out, right? At some point he doesn't get all the way through the book. Doesn't, you know, the fire consumes faster than he can read. And he's left there in the darkness until
Speaker: You know, it ends with him seeing some very far away light that he travels towards or travels towards him. And Karen is there and then he's out. Yeah. Yeah. So you said a second ago that when Will pulls out the book of book House of Leaves and starts reading it when he's in the void, there's no footnote commenting on that. And that's unusual because this book is filled with footnotes, right? Yeah, I think we should
Speaker: talk about the footnotes a little bit. I mentioned my opening question that this book provides its own buffet of interpretations and it does that often in the footnotes.
Speaker: There will be some footnote that says, oh, so -and -so wrote an article about this aspect of Will and Karen's marriage and how it's related to the decline of the American family. Or so -and -so did a monograph talking about the effect of the children's drawings on
Speaker: what the children's drawings revealed about their psychology and the house as well. And it just goes on and on and on. Like it's truly endless. I think there's probably more than a thousand references. Um, and I just want to give a list of the sort of interpretations that are mentioned here. So there are scientific ones, although conveniently those pages unfortunately get go missing according to John, right? Right. Very convenient. Yeah.
Speaker: There's a very unexpected late in the game historical connection. We find out that the original Jamestown settlers had some experience with like a staircase in the forest and that comes up like 90 % of the way through the book. It's just a couple of paragraphs.
Speaker: that very much felt like, okay, here, for you people who like that sort of explanation, have at it, right? Not at all central. And I am one of those people who likes that sort of explanation. So I enjoyed it, but it felt very kind of off the cuff. Wait, I also have to say to
Speaker: So that, so Zampano has the notes from this diary that supposedly is found from a Jamestown settler who ends up dying from exposure in the woods. And the text used to have an F, something that looked like an F instead of an S. And then Johnny Truin's footnote about that, he also, he replaces a bunch of S's with F's, which I thought was hilarious. It was really funny.
Speaker: I thought he was just playing with us. What did you think of that? Do you mean Johnny was playing with us or Daniel Luski was playing with us? Johnny, I thought. But then again, he doesn't really have that much of a playfulness about his footnotes in general. So maybe that's not fair.
Speaker: Well, it could have been playful. So as you said, there's every interpretation available and we have evidence for that in every part of the book. So just to note, like the formatting issues that we described before also fit with Johnny's footnotes. So like the split paragraphs, the columns, like Johnny's notes also conform to those weird formatting
Speaker: Rules for the most part and then it could be that he was playing with us but also it could be that he was somehow being Affected by the story like because that's how the story begins. He talks about being affected by the story So I don't it could have been either of those
Speaker: You know, early on in the story, he remarks that he changed Zampano's text for something, which I thought was extremely rude. And he I mean, Johnny also tells us stories about how he'll go into bars and just come up with some BS story on the fly.
Speaker: to impress whoever he's talking to. And those stories are very interesting. And according to his accounting, also very interesting to his audience. So we know he's a good storyteller. He's good at making things up. And it doesn't bother him to do so, right? And yet he's also one of our main narrators.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Anyways, so you wanted to get back to the different kinds of interpretations. Yeah, I just want to mention them, because it was interesting for me to put together this list and realize which ones I cared about more than others. So there's the historical, there's a lot of mythical analogies. And
Speaker: like to the Minotaur. There's the myth of echo and narcissus. There's a lot of biblical points if that's something you're interested in. There's a reference to Jonah and the whale, a reference to I Am My Brother's Keeper, Jacob and Esau, like you mentioned. There is potentially a very fruitful
Speaker: and interesting subplot regarding trauma and guilt regarding Will's relationship with the subject of one of his photographs who ended up dying and he allegedly feels a lot of guilt that he couldn't help and instead he took a photo. You can talk about the nature of architecture and music at one point. Someone says architecture is frozen music.
Speaker: And the noises that the house makes are that music coming to life because the house is unfreezing.
Speaker: There was an architect referenced multiple times, and it was just one of the ones I happened to Google. That was a real person who wrote real books about architecture. So some of the references are real, too. Yeah, just to throw it off, right? Yeah. But then we don't know if the quote was real, right? Yeah. I didn't dig that deeply. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of psychological takes on this.
Speaker: It's about the house reflects the psychology of who enters it. It reflects the parent -child relationship that person had. There's also phenomenological interpretations that perception shapes and creates a place. And this is all in here, right? Yeah. You can pick any of these. And Daniel Uski has lots to say about it and lots that's very incisive and interesting. Yeah.
Speaker: I was listening to podcasts about horror. It's October right now as we're recording, right before Halloween. One podcast I listened to talked about horror stories always taking on a format to lend it
Speaker: verisilimitude that to make it sound like it's a real story. So they even reference like Dracula and Frankenstein are written in the format of letters as if to show that this is a real person telling a story that happened to them. And those personal accounts
Speaker: trigger that horror feeling in us more. So I'll know for my own self, I don't believe in ghosts. But when I hear people talking about telling ghost stories and about experiences they've had, those stories are always the creepiest. They freak me out the most. And it's something about a person telling a story, just person to person, just saying something that happened to them. Whether it's fake or not, I have a hard time determining whether those stories are fake or not.
Speaker: And I can stretch and try and find logical explanations of for them but they never work it's it's really interesting how those kinds of stories. Are so scary like those stories are really scary and so I feel like these footnotes.
Speaker: fake and real give a feeling of reality that this is a real thing that happened. If all of these people have witnessed something either secondhand from the video or firsthand from being there and they're talking about it and they're responding to it, it lends it credibility.
Speaker: Yes, I agree. I think it also lends it credibility because there's such a wide variety of interpretations, tones, and voices that it is hard to believe a single author created all of them. Yes. And in fact, for most of the story, I thought that this story had been a collaborative writing project just collected by Daniel Husky, but apparently that's not true. But that was my assumption reading it for most of the book. Which is amazing, right? Yeah.
Speaker: He's so good at imitating all of these voices. Something you said made me think, I think it would be interesting to do some sort of survey and see how many popular horror novels are in the first person versus the third and compare that with other genres. I think you're onto something. There's something about a first person account that is so much more affecting.
Speaker: Well, I don't know if it's a first person account that's in the audio format, right? And there's a lot of talk about how Navidson's skill with the camera creates such a better product than when other people have the camera.
Speaker: And what a difference that makes so i hope we'll talk about this in our recap episode actually to go through and look at the stories we've read and. The framing story and the formatting because we've read across a different span of time that's why i think it's important to.
Speaker: note like when were these books written and so that we can kind of compare like does this change over the course of time like we talked a lot about with Abigail Lane being written in modern times when social media is actually a part of our lives and how that impacted the storytelling and does that so like a modern person reading Hill House or turn of the screw. It's a different response because that's not reflecting our current modern ways of communicating with each other so much.
Speaker: Right. I also think it's very important that this book was published in 2000 before there was social media. And before there was this sort of collaborative horror making that the house on Abigail Lane, I think more reflects or crowdsourced investigation or however you want to phrase it, this book came out right before that. And so I think that's part of why it's take is a little more academic, right?
Speaker: Um, because those would have been the people who had access to the means to propagate their analyses. It's not crowd sourced in quite the same way. It is an event every large number of people are talking about though. So.
Speaker: One of those interpretive frameworks that I just mentioned is the story of the Minotaur, which is an old myth. I'll just go over the myth because the House of Leaves has a twist on it, but the original story is that King Minos in Greece built a labyrinth and placed the Minotaur, a gruesome monster in it.
Speaker: And then he demanded as tribute that seven young women and seven young men be sent to him from conquered cities every year. And they were put into the labyrinth and the Minotaur killed them. They were essentially a sacrifice. One of those youths one year was Theseus. He entered the labyrinth bringing with him thread so he could mark his path in until he eventually encountered the Minotaur who he killed with his bare hands. And then using the thread was able to escape.
Speaker: So that's the standard minotaur story, but this one is different. Do you want to explain what happens in this one and how we can know visually that it's important? Right. So in Zampano's text, every reference to the minotaur is crossed out. And in the book, it's crossed out in red ink. And Johnny has a footnote where he says it's on panel, crossed it out, but he's including it in the manuscript anyway.
Speaker: In this section, but throughout, there are still some references to Minotaur. It's always crossed out in red ink. There's also a footnote describing a play based on the Minotaur story. The play has a twist where the Minotaur is the king's son.
Speaker: And he's placed in the labyrinth because he's an embarrassment. And then the youths allegedly fed to the Minotaur. Really, they just die in the maze because it's so complicated they can't get out. But then the king begins to love his son and plans to bring him out into the open and introduce him to the world. But in that moment, the Minotaur is brutally murdered by one of the youths who's described as a frat boy in the play.
Speaker: And then the king has to smile through his tears that he meant for that to happen in some way. As he congratulates the frat boy, also known as Theseus, right? Right, right, right. And so a couple hundred pages later, Johnny has a dream that is very similar to the play where Johnny feels like he is
Speaker: the deformed monster being hunted by a frat boy. And then the frat boy changes into someone else, a woman who he thinks might be one of his past lovers, or Thumper, the stripper he's obsessed with who was never his lover, but then
Speaker: It's not quite any of those women. And then here's a quote, either way, her face glows with adoration and warmth and her eyes communicate in a blank and understanding of all the gestures I've ever made, all the thoughts I've ever had. So extraordinary in this gaze, in fact, that I suddenly realize I'm unable to move. And then
Speaker: This woman, a strangely familiar face, takes an axe and chops him in the head and kills him in a very gruesome description. She swings multiple times. And then as the atriums of my heart on their own accord suddenly rupture, like my father's ruptured. So this I suddenly am using a peculiarly detached way, was this how he felt? So his father was killed in an accident. And so he's identifying himself as his father, I think,
Speaker: the woman who glows with adoration and warmth and understands everything about him. I think that's supposed to be his mother. Yeah, I buy that based on, you know, other things he says about his mother and his sort of ongoing grief for her loss. But something that stood out to me when you read that is that that gaze of understanding comes from
Speaker: the person who kills the Minotaur and who has chased him down, is there a similarity there between the house, which at some points is described as a monster that is chasing down Johnny and this person? And so, right, because when we learn about Zampano's body, there's claw marks next to his body. So early on, there's the suggestion that
Speaker: the house or maybe the manuscript or just the knowledge of both of them is a monster that hunts the people who get into deep. Here, obviously, in this story, the monster is not the Minotaur, but rather Theseus, the frat boy. But there's that moment of understanding when they meet is what I'm trying to think about now. Why would you get that from someone who's about to meet you in this moment of violence?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I think that there's definitely an association with Johnny being haunted by the house. Sometimes it's phrased as being haunted by darkness and being chased by darkness.
Speaker: And I think that's related to unresolved feelings of grief for his mother. So first of all, we should be clear, no monster ever appears in this house. We never get an explanation for the claw marks in Zampano's floor and the growling
Speaker: eventually becomes consistent in the story, that the growling, they think it's just the movement of the walls changing direction, that there is no monster in their growling hunting them, and it's just the darkness, and it's just this, I guess, the strangeness of the place, which is all, like, I also am forming a theory that part of the way that the stories resolve, both for the Navidson's and for Johnny, is that they confront whatever
Speaker: they need to confront it like psychologically. And that's what resolves the story. And that's what closes the house and releases them basically from being hunted by the darkness. Yes, I think that's true. Tell me, did you also have the impression that Johnny was being hunted by a creature or a monster?
Speaker: Yes. At some parts, it's definitely presented that way. Like there's a part where he's working in the tattoo shop and he has to go into a back closet and somehow it gets dark in that closet and he sort of freaks out and hears growling. I was waiting for the monster to come get him at some point, you know? Right. Okay. So both Johnny and Will Navidson or anyone who enters the haunted house are chased by something, a monster or darkness.
Speaker: And then there's some moment where they turn around and actually confront it, those who survive like Will and Johnny, and then they are allowed to go free. Is that it? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I still don't know why Johnny would be the monster or why he would be the Minotaur, right? I guess in that telling, the frat boy is the real monster.
Speaker: Yeah, but I think Johnny has these feelings of self loathing. And also he physically has scars on his arms that interpreted as making him deformed, right, like the sun in the play was deformed. He mentions those scars very early on. And he, when he's talking about telling a wild tale to make up a reason for why he has these scars, but they're like swirling
Speaker: burns on both of his arms, all up and down his arms. And then we don't get the real story for those burns until much, much later, where he talks about being four years old and having this really lovely memory with his mom cooking in the kitchen. And somehow she knocks the pan of hot oil over and he tries to catch the oil, and that's how his arms get burned.
Speaker: And then it's really unclear for me, I couldn't quite make it out if Johnny's father blamed his mother or thought she did it on purpose somehow. Like there's a partial telling of the story where it seemed like it was her fault and that that led to Johnny's father committing his mother. And so I wonder if there's some guilt there about Johnny as a child being part of the reason why his mom was taken away.
Speaker: even though he loves his dad and his dad dies in an accident a couple years later, as we said, and he was relatively happy with his dad. But I wonder if that's all tied in with grief and abandonment, because he was very young, like seven years old when she's finally taken away.
Speaker: Oh, and one of the appendices I flipped through is all of these letters from his mom in the asylum that she wrote to him. Yes, and we didn't read those for this because it was already a massive undertaking to try to discuss the first book. But yeah, that's definitely part of his motivation.
Speaker: So it seems like we're saying he has to confront that in some way, just as Will had to go back into the house the final time. But what does that mean, to confront something? I mean, in the section you read, it implies that he's going to face this woman. She's going to look upon him with understanding. And then what? He's frozen. He's so overwhelmed by her look that he's frozen and then she kills him, which
Speaker: I don't know that that's resolution. I think that's showing his fear of confronting this, this loss. Actually, yeah, I think you're right. Maybe.
Speaker: Maybe there was something he was supposed to do, but instead he froze. Do you think these two moments are similar when Johnny, granted only in a dream, but when he faces this frat boy who becomes a beneficently understanding woman and when Will goes back into the house and just disappears into this completely disorientated space? Are those both the moments of confrontation or does Johnny have a different one later?
Speaker: Well, I think Johnny's moment of confrontation is when he goes and visits the actual location of where his house was growing up and he has clarity. So he's describing this, trying to find this asylum, and he remembers
Speaker: something with claws and teeth in his childhood hallway and then he goes to that place in a later journal entry and we learn what happens in that hallway is that his mom is taken away and he has to say goodbye to her and that that is the monster right like that's not the thing with claws and teeth it's this memory of saying goodbye to his mom
Speaker: thinking that he's partially to blame for her being sent away as a child does. So I think that's true for Johnny. I think Will, I think the Navitin story is more about Will and Karen's relationship than it is about Will as an individual. And I guess that makes that fits in that he is rescued by Karen, to some extent, it seems like he's rescued by Karen's reappearance in the home.
Speaker: and she actually goes in and gets him. I mean, there's a lot at the beginning at the first bits of weird phenomena. And then there's a lot of footnote annotation from so -called experts talking about Karen. I felt like some of it was actually, well, I think a lot of the psychology is presented in a critical way that Zambano doesn't quite give credence to all of it. It's a little bit satirical, or maybe more than a little bit.
Speaker: Right, right. But when they moved to this house, Karen and Will and their two children, Chad and Daisy, and then they have a dog and a cat and the cat disappears at some point the way cats do. They're at a point in their relationship where Will has had this career where he's traveling the world photographing humans in like far places of the world. He's very well renowned. We learned at the beginning that there's a girl named Delisle
Speaker: And that's a point of contention for Karen and Tom because Karen doesn't know who Delisle is, just that it's a female who has a very strong hold on Will somehow. But anyway, so when they move in,
Speaker: Part of their goal in moving into this house is to sort of change their lifestyle to really recommit to each other. They're not married. We learn later Karen has had an affair and they're trying to come and have a domestic life together, which is something they have not had before, even though they've been together and have two children together. And so this hallway appears as a rift and it widens the rift. So Karen is extremely claustrophobic. So a dark space is
Speaker: Definitely no go for her, and she doesn't want Will to go, and that's presented as Will's desire to go out and travel and explore and be an adventurer, and somehow this domestic life is confining him, and here's this huge temptation in their house. Specifically, they move in together, or they move out to the country together, and Karen and Will have decided that he is giving up his travels and adventures, and he is going to stay home now.
Speaker: And then this adventure opens up in their own home and she holds him to his agreement. He is not allowed to enter the hallway and doesn't that she knows about until rescue is until someone needs to go into rescue Zed and Reston, right? No, it's to rescue Jad and Lax and Holloway. That's right. Sorry. So what we're saying is it's kind of a reflection of where they are in their relationship.
Speaker: But it's also very much a reflection of Will too, because as a photojournalist, he's been to the most dangerous places in the world. And then he comes home and the house becomes the most dangerous place. And he has to traverse it one more time to finally be home.
Speaker: And there is this suggestion that after he does that, and they all move away and leave the house, they do kind of have that pleasant domestic life that they were seeking. I mean, obviously there are lifelong scars, literally and figuratively, but they do escape to home at the end, right?
Speaker: Yes, so they had to confront something to get there. So there's a period where they escape the house right after Tom is swallowed up and killed and Karen and Will are separated and then Will goes back into the hallway and at that point there's a really interesting
Speaker: a remark that the people who had been in the house and had suffered some, I don't know, symptoms, like there's a list, there's a very official looking list of like ranking the severity of the effect of the house on each of these people, like Reston feels cold and Karen has insomnia and Chad, their son,
Speaker: has, is mute some of the time and Daisy, I forget what Daisy's symptom was, but when, so there's a period where Will is editing tape and then, and there's all suffering these effects, then Will goes back in and at that moment, these symptoms on everyone else kind of decreases a lot, which is, I didn't know what to make of that. Well, to me, that said that the, the void, the hallway, whatever we want to call this extra space,
Speaker: was really tied to will or maybe to will and karen and something about them going through it and coming out together like he'll do right so when will is missing in his fifth expedition and he's gone for a month. During that time karen is editing the video and she creates these two short videos one of which is.
Speaker: strictly about Will and tells a sort of short biography. And I wonder if that having Will gone made her appreciate what she had, or like sort of shifted her perspective on her relationship with him, because he was fully gone. Yeah, I mean, he's given I guess he's been gone before, but not fully gone and potentially dead.
Speaker: Yeah, I do agree with you that to the extent the house is responding to the psychology of people involved, it's probably Will and Karen together, not just Will. So Will is missing. Karen is ready to sell the house, but then she moves in. Her kids, by the way, are still staying with her mother. So she's in the house by herself, which definitely says something has changed because that's freaky, but she seems to be OK with it. And she hears Will's voice occasionally.
Speaker: And I wonder if her being there and being receptive to bringing Will back is what opened it up again and let her go find him. I feel like it's really both of them, like working separately to try and come back together is what eventually physically lets it happen within the house. Right. But I don't know what the transformation is for Will. I mean, obviously he has this physical
Speaker: or metaphysical journey into the void and it becomes all disorienting. But what is the psychological shift for will as a part of that?
Speaker: So the first time he goes in and is separated from Weston and Tom and everyone else, the way he gets back, he says he starts climbing the stairs, and he just starts climbing. He knows it's impossible, but he's just going to start climbing the stairs anyway. And he says, at one moment, he was thinking about Delisle, and the staircase grew longer. But then he stopped thinking about Delisle, and he started thinking about Karen and his kids, and then the staircase got shorter, shorter enough for him to finally get back home.
Speaker: And then the second time he's lost in there, everything is stripped away from him. Gravity is stripped away. Light is stripped away. And it's just him and himself. And I wonder if that's, you know, he wanted to be an explorer as a photographer. He wanted to go out alone. He didn't like to have guides. He liked to figure it out for himself and be the lone adventurer. And so here he was so completely alone. One of the songs he sings is Daisy, which is his daughter's name.
Speaker: I didn't make that connection about when he thinks of Delisle, he gets farther away. So I think we should explain briefly who Delisle is. It turns out that that is the name that he gave to a five -year -old child who died of hunger and of whom he took a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that shows her dying, her holding something. I think it's a bone that she's trying to eat or get some nutrition off of.
Speaker: And in the background, there is a vulture waiting for her to die because she is that far gone. And so it was this prize -winning photograph, but he felt enormous amounts of guilt because he didn't save her at all, right? He took a photo, which seems singularly helpless. And it turns out later, we find out that he took the photo in one second and then he grabbed her and ran and tried to find help for her and couldn't, but he carries this guilt. And so what you're saying is that when he thinks about her, he gets more lost.
Speaker: But when he thinks about Karen, the void sort of recedes. It puts distance. Yeah, it puts distance. Distance between him and Karen. Is that similar to Johnny? I mean, Johnny has his own thing in the past that he's obsessed with and feels guilt about, you know, his mother being taken away.
Speaker: No, I think it's different. I mean, just like the darkness responds to the person who's in, in the hallway, because people have different baggage to deal with. I think we should talk about Johnny as a foil to the domesticity of the Navidsons. And there's plenty written about, you know, their marriage has, or their relationship, they aren't married has problems. Everyone does. It's the story of them coming back together. But it is still at heart a domestic story.
Speaker: And in contrast to that, we have Johnny Truant who has no family. He has this one friend named Lude who he hangs out with and they drive around town at night trying to score drugs and have one night stands. It seems like a pretty different life from the domesticity of the Navinsons.
Speaker: Yes, and so we know that Will and Karen were looking to improve the relationship. Was Johnny looking for anything when he stumbled upon the manuscript? What we know about his frame of mind was that he was obsessed with a stripper whom he nicknamed Thumper. And there was a lot of lust. He really lusted after her. He was super obsessed with her. But I don't know if that points to a longing for anything. What do you think? I don't know.
Speaker: He has a lot of desire in the sexual sense, and there is a lot of description of his sex life and his occasional crushes on Thumper, but I think there's a couple other women he describes as having a crush on. But I don't know what his actual desire is. It's not as clear.
Speaker: Yeah, so there are a couple women that are like more developed characters and seem to have more of an impact on Johnny. So there's Ashley, who's it's really weird. She's engaged, she finds him, they have sex. And she's like, I just want to know what that was like. And he's like, Oh, I have I met you before he didn't remember where he had met her. And she said, Yeah, we met in Texas. And then much, much later, we get a footnote explaining, not Texas, the state, but there was a person he knew named Tex.
Speaker: and he met Ashley at Tex's house. And I wondered if that was a story of missed opportunity. Like, Ashley was a woman who he really could have had a future with. He could have settled down and had a family with Ashley. Then there's Curie, who has a boyfriend, who's very muscular. He's nicknamed Gdanskman.
Speaker: She is a super rich CEO and yet she wants to sleep with Johnny for some reason and drives him up in his BMW up Mulholland Drive and they have a wild night while her boyfriend is in Europe. So Kiri was introduced to Johnny by lewd. So the boyfriend learns that Johnny and Kiri slept together.
Speaker: And he wants to kill both Lude and Johnny and he comes and he very nearly kills Lude. And so Johnny is in a terrible state. He hasn't been eating. He's just been focused on the manuscript and he finds Lude in the hospital and then Lude somewhat recovers but is addicted to drugs, which he was before, but now he's addicted to different drugs and finds and in a moment of being drugged out, crashes and kills himself in a horrible accident.
Speaker: There's so much told about that. It feels important. I'm not 100 % sure why. Well, that happens sort of on what I think of as the down slope at the end of the story where things are sort of picking up. Johnny has decided he's going to make some kind of move and he ends up going out to Virginia to try to find the house and then try to find his childhood home.
Speaker: So I don't know what to make of that. It seems somewhat like losing the few connections he had when he lost lewd, like the few connections to a specific place. What did you make of all the sex?
Speaker: in his story. I mean, almost every footnote is the account of a different sex capade, right? Well, yes, it was getting pretty gross and gratuitous. And I was like, really, like, almost like pornographic fantasies of a, of an adolescent, right? Yeah, quite the counterpoint to the very academic road of the manuscript, right? Like, that is
Speaker: you know, pretentious, and maybe Danielewski is making fun of that a little bit, but part of making fun of it is to just juxtapose it really bluntly with this immature kid, really, who's obsessed with sex and drugs and not much else. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like all of those sexcapades sort of ended when he talks about Lude's list.
Speaker: So he and Lewd compare and write lists of all the women they've slept with in the last month. And he makes the list and describes specific sex acts that Lewd did with each of these women. And that to me was like the epitome of like, really, I really don't care about this.
Speaker: But then he turns it around and talks about, he recognizes that each of these women is a unique individual with a history and maybe this activity isn't the healthiest activity and recognizes that these women may have had experiences, painful experiences that led them to having one night stands with gross losers like Lude and Johnny.
Speaker: which is like so close to the revelation he should have about himself, right? That he is sort of frantically engaging in these activities in order to
Speaker: escape something or seek something. And I'm not saying that's true about all casual sex. The book makes that very clear. And in fact, there's a quote. People frequently comment on the emptiness in one -night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. So Johnny himself is pursuing these one -night stands as a way to throw himself into darkness while also being distracted from it.
Speaker: Right. Well, and then part of that quote too is desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex. So we were talking about what is Johnny's desire at the beginning, and it's reflected in the sexual desire for Thumper.
Speaker: Yeah, we're talking about more than sexual desire, right? A deeper seated desire of some kind. Right. And I think it's really interesting that he comes back to Thumper. He has one heirloom from his mom, which is a locket on a beautiful gold chain. He sells the locket, but he gives the chain to Thumper and he comes back after his road trip to Virginia, but also other places that we're not sure about.
Speaker: And Thumper is wearing the necklace and she never takes it off. And they have a very like domestic date where she cooks for him in his home. She also has a young child. And so she's a mother, but he has no lust for her at that point. Like they he says goodbye to her and they're just friends. And it's a very like heartwarming encounter. It is actually even though he says, you know, I've given up my dreams of life with Thumper, they clearly still have some connection and some just straightforward enjoyment of each other.
Speaker: She does care for him. She does reach out to him many times when she knows he's in a really bad place, but he always refuses to go have dinner with her until he comes back from his long road trip. Is there a moment where the creature stops chasing Johnny? Was that clear to you? Because by the end of the book, it seems like he's not being chased, but when did that happen?
Speaker: Well, Johnny tells us he goes to Seattle and spends time with some doctor friends who clean him up, start feeding him healthy food, and then the next journal entry is like, you believed that crap. That was such crap. What makes you think that I would have not just one friend who's a doctor, but two friends who are doctors? You're stupid for believing that. I was like, all right.
Speaker: I don't know. But there is some kind of shift where it seems like he's no longer being pursued by whatever was in the book, whatever obsession it gave him. Yeah, it's so hard because all of those journal entries are out of order or like you start reading a journal entry and he's like he has no memory of the last month or so and then he backtracks and rereads what happens and then yeah, so there's an in that
Speaker: That part, there's maybe it's this point where one journal entry talks about him like a dance man and Curie find him and dance man is about to kill him, but he turns it around and he takes he gets the upper hand and he's like beating.
Speaker: Gdanskman and Kiri is watching and she's trying to stop him and there's a moment where he turns and he looks at her and he's like, I'm going to kill your boyfriend and then I'm going to take you someplace and rape and murder you. And that's left as a cliffhanger. We don't know for many pages if he actually killed them both, because then he goes in and retells the story of like,
Speaker: going on his road trip, but something stops him. So maybe that's the moment where it stops haunting him that he's lost lewd. He's grieved his mother and his father. And that's when he's able to sort of snap out of it and not be a monster who would murder and rape people. I think that might be some of it. I think it might also happen when he finishes the book.
Speaker: Right? Because at some point he says to himself, because this whole time as he's been descending into madness, he has been working on the book, which means going through Zampo's notes, putting them together, I guess, retyping them. At some point he says to himself, essentially, I must finish this book. And he refers to finishing the book as reentering this thing in a tomb. Make it only a book, he says.
Speaker: Yeah. And maybe that happens when the band hands him the finished copy, right? It's like one of these endless journeys where the closer you get to finishing it the farther away he is. But then this exterior force says, hey, there's some loophole in time you actually finished it. And maybe that means he's free. It's now just a book.
Speaker: Yeah, so the book begins. There are several warnings about don't don't read this book. There's something dangerous about just reading this book, something dangerous for the reader, which really did get to me like I actually had a moment where I was like, should I cancel this? Like maybe we shouldn't read this.
Speaker: I definitely have images and stories that have stuck in my head that are sort of hurtful. Like I wish I hadn't seen or read those things because they stick in my brain in a painful way. And I was like, is this book going to have the same effect on me? This book did genuinely frighten me.
Speaker: Both times I've read it 10 years apart. So it is genuinely scary. But yeah, a lot of that is about words itself. Words themselves, like you said, can have this enormous power. But Johnny suggests that it's failing to finish the book is actually the dangerous thing.
Speaker: Right. And so I think that is an accomplishment because it is such a winding, not just rich, but baroque story that it would be possible to just endlessly research and research and comment and comment and never finish it. And that's probably what happened to Zampano.
Speaker: Yeah, Zampano also kind of interred himself in a tomb, right? He was in his apartment that he never left. He'd covered all the windows. Whereas it seems like part of what saves Johnny is that he breaks out. He goes on this road trip. He travels. He gets some movement in there.
Speaker: Yeah, because he was, he sort of was imitating the behavior of Zampano of like closing off his room. He stopped paying his bills so he didn't have electricity and so he was cooking, or maybe he wasn't even cooking. He says he eats tuna, like he's surviving on tuna, which is just so gross. He says he can, he knows he smells bad. Like he loses a bunch of weight. Like he was, he was going in that same direction as Zampano.
Speaker: I don't know if it's important that he gives up drugs and alcohol, like he tries at one point to go get some psychological help and has these pills to help him sleep and discern reality from delusion. But he doesn't he's afraid of those pills. And he throws the pills away. And at that point, he also gives up all drugs and alcohol. It's so hard to tell what actually causes the tone shift towards
Speaker: something more optimistic for Johnny, both because, you know, the way the story is told, it's so chopped up in time. It's hard to tell what happened first and then next. But all the things we've named, like giving up the drug and alcohol, the road trip, his meetings with Thumper and all of that, they're all part of this tone shift, but it's really hard to say what did it. Yeah. What caused the rest. So one question I had was about the title.
Speaker: House of Leaves, it obviously comes up two places within the book when Will suddenly in the void starts reading a book called House of Leaves. And then when the band in the bar hands Johnny a copy of House of Leaves. But nowhere else that I saw, you know, in the section we read, which didn't include the dependencies, was there any reference to a House of Leaves, to leaves as a symbol?
Speaker: whether that's leaves of a tree or a book. I just didn't see where the title comes from. Yeah, I didn't either. Like there's no explicit reference. It is interesting. Every appearance of the word house is in blue text. We haven't mentioned that yet, which I guess is like hyperlink text. I mean, this book came out in 2000. Was that convention around
Speaker: I think so. I don't know what to make of that. It is a deliberate omission that I think probably took work that the word leaves doesn't appear anywhere because we have, as I have said before, like a thousand footnotes covering every potential interpretation or analogy
Speaker: And nobody mentioned branches of a tree or leaves or anything like that. I don't know. I suspect that's a deliberate omission on Danielewski's part. Yes. Of all the breadcrumbs, there's no breadcrumbs about the title.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean leaves, I think leaves as in pages and the fact that Johnny is reading leaves of Zampano's book and collecting them and sorting them and that gives him a haunted experience as if he was in The Haunted House too. That's my not very thought out impression of that.
Speaker: Yeah, I almost wondered too, if will reading House of Leaves in The Void, is he reading the book that Johnny wrote? We don't know, right? I guess that's no weirder than Johnny being handed a copy of the book he wrote before he's finished it, you know, as happens in the bar at the end.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think I cannot forget that there's no, like Johnny can find no real world confirmation that the Navinsons existed, or that the record existed. And like, there's that moment I described before when Will goes back into the house and
Speaker: everyone who felt the effects of the house, their symptoms start to go away. I wonder if that started a chain reaction that eventually led to the whole existence of that and the whole experience of that disappearing from reality in some kind of way. Like it's healed at no trace remains, even in memory, something like that.
Speaker: Yes, although it does say that some people had worse effects. And so I think that was describing Zampano and Johnny that there is a trace of this and it has huge effect on some people. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, does it make sense to talk about genre themes with this book? Sure. We've talked about skepticism and which characters are skeptics. All the characters here are skeptics initially. There's no true believer.
Speaker: or no immediate believer, let me say. We also have a house responding to the psychology of those who enter, and that's explicitly listed as a possible explanation. Again, as with everything with this book, it's not true that's the explanation, but it is one that's offered.
Speaker: Right. Well, and also you've used the phrase pressure cooker that the house is a pressure cooker for whatever dynamics are happening in the family, or in the individuals who are being haunted. Yeah, I think that's definitely true in this story. So I don't know if this is a theme or a trope. But there are these fake outs. For example, wax has been shot in the shoulder. So he's injured and Jed is trying to
Speaker: get him out and get him away from Holloway. And they wind up in a very small room, just sort of exhausted. And then there's banging on the door and it's very strong and, you know, powerful, like some beast. And then the chapter ends. And then it takes another couple of chapters before we learn. We find the other side of that. It's the people banging on the door are will and rest and coming to rescue them. So that's kind of like a fake out.
Speaker: Something else that came up in this book a lot was sex. And I think we realized when we were talking about this initially that sex and horror is actually very common. It happens to have not been common in the books we chose, which maybe says something about us. Right. I don't think either you or I particularly enjoyed, you know, the sex capades. But I do think that is common in horror. And then the question is kind of why is that?
Speaker: So there was some sex in Stephen King's The Shining, which I think it's very common in Stephen King. Like there was a part where Danny is looking at the clock and the little clock people come out to ring the hour and they perform gross sex acts. And it's even more gross because it's Danny, a five year old boy, watching this.
Speaker: Right. So yes, sex has been out there in books. I remember Stephen King, not in The Shining, but in his book on writing, saying that if he couldn't scare the reader, he was never afraid to go for the gross out. He saw that as sort of like a step down from what he wanted, which was to scare them. But grossing them out and getting that strong reaction was also good. And I wonder if sex is the same, not necessarily because sex is gross, although some of these descriptions were
Speaker: but rather it just animates a similarly strong reaction. And maybe once you do that and sort of jolt someone out of the status quo, it's easier to scare them. Yeah. Well, I think, too, sex can be related to taboo or can be related to, well, privacy. We've talked a lot about privacy in relation to haunted houses and isolation. And having something public that is meant to be private can evoke something like horror.
Speaker: Yes, true. Yes. A final theme that we keep coming back to is that the monster or the darkness or the haunting, whatever you want to call it, is just you yourself. Right. Yeah. I'm curious what, if you don't mind sharing, what particularly scared you in this book? So for me, it was
Speaker: the disorientation and the formatting, actually. It did leave me disoriented enough to realize how important it is to me to feel stable and steady in space and time, and it just sort of undermined it enough to make me see that all as very fragile.
Speaker: When you take it for granted, gravity exists. What is up remains up. What is down remains down, etc. What if that went away somehow? What if that's tissue thin and not really there? What if there's something else there? Did you find it to be scary?
Speaker: No, and this reminds me of our conversation about borderland where I didn't find the passage of time or traveling through outer space as unnerving. I definitely was disoriented, but I enjoyed the puzzle of it. And actually, the puzzles and the references and the jokes, I enjoy this attention to detail that takes, to have the different colors and all of that. Very meticulous.
Speaker: found a couple of what I think are typos, but I honestly don't know because it could be deliberate, right? Like that bugs me, but it's, it's not horrifying. Yeah, I enjoyed the footnotes and the academic language and all that. That was just enjoyable. Some of it is surprisingly insightful, even though it is, I think, intended as satire. So that part I enjoyed the core of the story. Oh, and Johnny being feeling hunted by some monster. You know, there's some
Speaker: forbidden knowledge in this book that is so terrible that it will track you down if you learn about it. Those are scary thoughts to me.
Speaker: No, that's definitely, those are scary and they did creep me out, but all of that disappeared for me when Karen went back into the labyrinth and found Will. I don't know. It felt a little corny that the love, love saved them, you know? But I thought you liked happy endings and resolutions, right? I do. I do usually like happy endings and resolutions and explained phenomena, right? Like everything is very much explained.
Speaker: in this book. Yeah, I don't know why it kind of, like being hunted, that was really scary. But when it turns out that that darkness that they had to face was really their own history, that does not feel scary to me. It's like, oh, it's in your own head. Like, why is it scary if it's like, I'm not afraid of things in my own head. Maybe I was at one point in my life, but right now I'm not. Well, to me,
Speaker: It remains scary because that was only one of the possible interpretations of what it was. I mean, I agree the clues are there. You could arrive at that interpretation that it's a reflection of their relationship, etc. But it's not a given, at least not enough to me to be corny. Yeah. So I thought it kind of saved itself from its own corniness by having all these different voices going on. So do you have any final thoughts?
Speaker: Well, I loved the puzzle of it. I loved there's potentially a lot of like internet sleuthing I could do. I probably won't because I think I enjoy the possibility of internet sleuthing more than the actual activity of internet sleuthing.
Speaker: to close all the loops and find all of the clues and the hints and the puzzles. I think I'm most struck by Johnny's story, which when I finished reading the book, I don't like Johnny. If he was a real person, I don't think I would like him very much.
Speaker: Although I feel like I've known a lot of people like Johnny, but not friends, but co -workers or associates or something. And there's just not a lot to connect with. So he felt very real, but also like, I guess I just didn't enjoy reading his part of the story as much. But at the end, I am really touched by his story. It was very poignant. So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, in some ways, I found his story more touching, even though at times I liked him less than the story of the Navisons. I did enjoy both. You mentioned the possibility of continuing to read and research this book and try to crack the code, put together the puzzle. And I've been thinking about that because we read this 500 plus page book, we've talked about it now, and there's still so much that could be said and thought and discovered.
Speaker: But I kind of don't trust the author enough to go down that road because all of this is just so ironic and there's so many interpretations. There are things here that I really get out of this book and really love, things that were insightful that had an impact on me.
Speaker: But I kind of feel like the author would be winning too much if I took up, you know, if I took it up the invitation to turn this into an endless puzzle because it's not that hard to make something an endless puzzle, right? You just, you know, you provide hints and never answers. And I think we've seen enough of that. You know, there were a series of TV shows where that was very popular and there was I think we've gotten sick of that.
Speaker: So I'm not interested in going down that road, but I would reread this many times over the years and enjoy it because I thought it was a good story or stories. You know, it's like five or six stories. Yeah. And I will add to all of the academic analyses, like looking into myths and biblical stories, like that did definitely satisfy a part of me. I do love that when my fiction brings in that kind of
Speaker: highbrow thinking. Yes, it is catnip to me, whatever that says about me. I enjoy that. And G as well. Listeners, what did you think of House of Leaves? Have you read any books by Mark Z. Danielewski? You spent a lot of time unraveling the puzzles and clues in the book.
Speaker: What do you think about haunted house stories and the horror genre in general? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing openingquestionatgmail .com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod .com. We will read your responses and play your voice memos on our next episode.
Speaker: So listeners, we hope you've enjoyed listening to these haunted house discussions as much as we have enjoyed having them. And we ask that you support our brand new podcast by telling your friends and leaving a review on your podcast app. The book club podcast is produced by Carly Jackson and Caroline Gorman music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.
