House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

From Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

House of Leaves affected me in the same ways it affected everyone else. The story captivated me, and the structure blew my mind (give the book a quick thumb-through next time you are at the bookstore), and the characters were abnormally well-developed for what horror fiction has traditionally produced. But House of Leaves affected me on a separate, more personal level as well. I love Jorge Luis Borges. He is the king of metafictional narratives (RE: fiction that consistently reminds the reader that he/she is reading fiction). For years nobody has been able to do what Borges has done for metafiction. But quote me on this, give Danielewski a few more years/books, and he will be the next Borges. And Danielewski knows his stuff, too. Here’s a small tip/spoiler for you: Zampanò is Borges.

The bottom line with House of Leaves is that even if you hate literary horror, even if you cannot stand metafiction, even if the idea of reading 700+ pages of the two aforementioned genres makes you want to burn down a library, read this book for no other reason that seeing what the medium of the novel is capable of doing. In a time dominated by high-tech, visual entertainment House of Leaves might just be the reinvention of literature.