What is House of Leaves? Part I: The Navidson Record

Growing tension in a film, a House and a relationship

The House on Ash Tree Lane

House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski is the most unique novel I've ever read; very possibly the most unique novel ever published. It has been described as horror, romance, satire, encyclopedic, ergodic and much else besides.

That's truly all I can tell you before my warning: if you want to experience this book for yourself, turn away now. There will be spoilers in these posts; but as usual my goal is to share what's fascinating about the text rather than ruining it for you if you have yet to read it.

Still here? Well, the simplest way I can describe House of Leaves is that it is a story (The Navidson Record) within a story (Zampanò's writing) within a story (Johnny Truant's & the Editors' writing) within or adjacent to another story (The Whalestoe Letters).

If that sounds structurally complicated to navigate, you'd be correct! Johnny's and a portion of Zampanò's narratives are told through fictional footnotes added to the 'main' text, while the Letters serve as an Appendix which the reader is pointed toward at a certain point. You may recall that in my post about audiobooks, I said adapting House of Leaves would be impossible – believe it or not, this is only half of the reason.

I'll be approaching House of Leaves' narrative layers by starting from the simplest and working toward most obscure by the end of the following post. So without further ado, let's talk about a movie that exists even less than you might expect.

House of Leaves

The Navidson Record

The Navidson Record is presented as either found-footage horror fiction or as a genuine documentary, following the lives of Karen Green, Will Navidson and their children Chad and Daisy in the months after they move into the titular House on Ash Tree Lane (every instance of 'House' in the book is printed in blue text; I'll have to settle for capitalizing it here). Navidson is a fictionalized version of photojournalist Kevin Carter, known for and haunted by his prize-winning photograph of 'The Vulture and the Little Girl.'

Karen & Will have moved into the House in hopes of allowing their relationship to heal, following Will's many long and stressful absences for work. He sets up cameras throughout the House "[hunting] for moments, pearls of the particular, an unexpected phone call, a burst of laughter, or some snippet of conversation which might elicit from us an emotional spark and perhaps even a bit of human understanding." It's clear that Navidson is used to navigating life from behind a camera and solving problems through it, and is attempting to do the same for his relationship with his family.

Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect. Upon returning home one day, the family discovers that two doors bookending a short hallway have appeared on the upper floor of their home, somehow undetected by the motion-sensing cameras. Navidson's immediate fixation on this development is amplified when he discovers that, impossibly, the width of the House measured through this new hallway consistently exceeds the external width of the House by a quarter inch.

Polaroids of the House on Ash Tree Lane (pg. 572)

This is only the warm-up act to a story rife with strangeness, which sees Navidson call in first his brother then multiple veteran explorers to investigate the growing liminal space within the House: dark hallways, grand halls, a strange staircase and perhaps, just out of sight, a Minotaur (all references to the mythology of which are red in the book) roaming this alien labyrinth.

Navidson wants once again for this to be a problem he can solve with his camera: to capture, encapsulate and understand it. But (other than the first and last Explorations) he gives into Karen's pleas to let someone else – explorers Holloway, Jed and Wax – take on the actual legwork. After all, Karen's attempt to reconnect with her partner has once again been overtaken by his devotion to his work; this time literally within their own home. But she simply can't get through to him, and must eventually escape with the kids.

A fan-made version of "Exploration A"

The film includes some interviews Karen conducts related to two early-released segments showing explorations of the House. This one seeks to explain Navidson's fixation:

"Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don’t have to. They know there’s nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. They’re haunted by that infinite hollow and its sense-making allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by It."

As you'll see in the following post, all of these in-text interpretations are meant to be taken with a grain of salt: Danielewski is clearly having a lot of fun both engaging with and heavily satirizing critical analysis. Nonetheless, I think this is as close as the book gets to spelling out Navidson's need to categorize and understand the mystery in front of him, in spite of the much more concrete needs of his family around him.

Exploration #3, by Adrián de la Cruz

The Explorations also seem to prove this idea, by constantly adding fuel in the form of new oddities to the fire of Navidson's interest. The space proves to be dynamic, both spatially and in response to the perception of its occupants:

As Jed and Wax resume their climb back up the spiral Staircase, they discover every neon marker they left behind has been torn apart. Furthermore the higher they get, the more the markers have been devoured. Around this time, Jed also begins to notice how more than a few of his buttons have vanished. Strips of velcro have fallen off his parka, shoe laces have shredded forcing him to bind his boots together with duck tape. Amazingly enough, even his pack frame has “crumbled”—the word Jed uses. “It’s kind of scary” Wax mutters in the middle of a long ramble. “Like you stop thinking about something and it vanishes. You forget you have pocket zippers and pow they’re gone. Don’t take nothing for granted here.”

But the fates of the explorers and their struggle against the maddening, interminable darkness I must leave for you to discover yourself, if you so choose. I can promise it is eerie, fascinating and quite profound. If you want slightly more spoilers, the incredible video essayist Jacob Geller recently covered one deeply resonant moment from House of Leaves (and a couple parallels) in his piece "Fear of Dark".

A Book About a Film

I'll wait to discuss the end of The Navidson Record until after we've checked in on the footnotes and annotations of Zampanò and Johnny Truant. That might sound a little strange; why pause watching Nosferatu to listen to some critic?

But, well, it turns out that the entirety of The Navidson Record and the vast wealth of critical pieces written about it were concocted whole cloth by an old man named Zampanò. Especially impressive, perhaps, because for all the visual detail and focus on pictures and cameras in his recounting and discussion of the film... Zampanò is also blind.

What is House of Leaves? Navidson's fixation is a big part of it, but not the whole. I've so far avoided using the word 'obsession', but it moves the needle a little closer. Come back next time as we delve deeper into this bizarre masterpiece!

Thanks for reading <3