House of Leaves (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
- First Published: 2000
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1980’s-1990’s
- Setting: Virginia, California, and Alaska
- Principal Characters: Zampanò, Johnny Truant, Pelafina Heather Lievre, Will Navidson, Karen Green
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Virginia, United States or Americans, Twentieth century, 1980’s, California, Filmmaking or filmmakers, 1990’s, Horror, Alaska, Houses, mansions, or manors, Parallel universes or alternate dimensions
- Locales: Virginia, California, Alaska
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is ambitiously postmodern on the scale of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Both are long, convoluted novels with multiple strands of narrative, lots of footnotes, and much self-consciousness in their use of literary form. While Wallace explored the theme of the addictiveness of popular culture in the context of Alcoholics Anonymous, Danielewski writes in the gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft as filtered through the mock documentary format of the film The Blair Witch Project (1999). The...
[The entire page is 2038 words long]
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