Discussing House of Leaves and my take aways

I took the dive and it really wasn't that bad after all!

Yes, the rumors are true! I have accomplished the herculean task of reading the cult classic House of Leaves. As I’m sure you could tell, this is tongue and cheek. At its very core this is just a cleverly told story that developed a cult following, but it really isn’t as difficult as people think it is. A dear friend of mine urged me to read it and I spent weeks trying to find it. Could you believe more than once someone at a bookstore told me they just sold their only copy the day prior? It just kept happening! But finally I found it!

But of course, once I had it I had to work up the nerve to read it and that took months. But I did it! The hype and intimidation around this book honestly reminded me of how people talk about the video game Dark Souls. Except unlike Dark Souls, I finished House of Leaves. Not because Dark Souls was too hard, but because I wasn’t especially interested in the story  (I acknowledge that isn’t the point of the game, but I prefer games with gripping narratives and Dark Souls didn’t do it for me sadly), but with House of Leaves I was very quickly gripped by the strange layers upon layers of story laid out before me.

For those of you who are new here, welcome to this little series. Here’s how it works: I read a book that is either widely acclaimed or acknowledged as a classic, and then I talk about what I learned and how I think reading it could make me a better writer. They say good writers need to read a lot. I’ve learned it’s more about quality rather than quantity, but I’m still putting it into practice. Given the renown in this specific case, I’m also going to tack on a bonus to the end of this where I want to talk about something I’ve been mulling over since finishing the book. I’ll call it ‘the problem of evil’ for now, but we’ll get to that later. First, let’s talk about what I learned. What I learned will broadly fit into three categories - funny how I always make that happen. Like it's a theme or something. Hm, best not to think too much about that. 

The categories will be as follows: Meaning, likability, and novelty. Fairly simple concepts to address, so let’s see how they fit together…

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Meaning

House of Leaves (HoL) is absolutely dripping with meaning. If you think too hard about it, you could spend years trying to make sense of it all. Apparently it isn’t uncommon for people to keep pretty extensive notes while reading through it. I can’t say I entirely blame them either. There’s a lot going on in this story and there is a lot to understand and interpret. And yet this story reminded me of something I already know, but I feel like it is important to keep reminding myself: Everything can have meaning, but it isn’t always the author’s intent. Not only that, but the meaning you pull from it isn’t always what the author intended it to be. It’s a simple thing, but one that’s easily looked over. Honestly, I look over it myself with my own work sometimes.

When I finished HoL, I recall thinking about how much depth was shoved into this book. In fact, there’s a page at the end with a key that gives meaning to symbols that are plastered throughout the book. For a brief moment I thought “I could reread this and find out what all these layers mean - wait no. No. I don’t have time for that.” In this case, I decided even if there is meaning in the piece beyond what I pulled from it, it wouldn’t be worth it for me to try and find that meaning because I just didn’t care to. And that’s okay! That’s a part of the story that I personally didn’t need to fill out with further meaning, but maybe others may find that part especially engaging. In that case, it’s there in the open for them. This is a great example of making meaning, but it isn’t required reading or information for every reader.

In a different vein, one of the more off putting parts of HoL is Johnny’s constant need to interject at parts of the book and discuss his sexcapades. Danielewski is not shy on details in these sections, and it can be somewhat uncomfortable and jarring when you’re in the middle of these really intense or unsettling scenes of horror. Out of nowhere, our strange editor dips in to tell you about this girl he met at a bar and all they got up to. At first I thought that this was just weird and done for some sort of edge factor. But after it happened a couple of times, I started thinking that it had to mean something. It didn’t seem to me that Danielewski did anything just for the hell of it, so why would this be an exception? This example is actually spoonfed to you in the story, so it is extremely hard to misconstrue why Johnny won’t stop talking about all the women that just can’t get enough of him (some readers even think he’s lying about most of them though we do know that at least one was true). I won’t delve into the why too much, but my point is that HoL appears to have a why for everything that happens in the story. There appears to be a reason why everything happens even when it doesn’t appear that there’s a reason at first. It is a really cool way of telling a story, but it can also be exhausting if you want to know the why of everything.

So as a writer, I ask myself: Does it matter if people don’t always understand your story? If they don’t pick up on foreshadowing, symbolism, whatever else? Well, no. I didn’t understand everything in HoL, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with it. Not only that, but I may very well have misinterpreted parts of the story. The messages I derived were still meaningful to me, but they may not have been the author’s intent - thinking of the alleged story of a college student arguing with Ray Bradbury about Fahrenheit 451 or Margaret Atwood having someone explain to her what Handmaid’s Tale is about. I don’t think those people’s perspectives are any less valid, but it is invalid to push that your interpretation is the interpretation. Even as a writer, I don’t think I can push that point upon my readers either. I can tell you what something means to me, but in the grand scheme what matters is what resonates with each person. 

Bonus note:  This would be a good opportunity to discuss the concept of Media Literacy and the need to be able to interpret media, and how if you can’t do that then you’re not really understanding what you’re consuming. I used to agree with that, but I don’t think I entirely do anymore. To that, I’d recommend watching Zoe Bee’s video on media literacy as I found it an interesting and persuasive argument on the concept. Anywho, moving on!

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Likability

I don’t typically look online at other people’s opinions after finishing a book. I typically like to gather my own thoughts then hop into discussions and see where I stand compared to other readers. I didn’t do that with HoL. Why? Because I honestly ended the book with more questions than answers so I took to the internet to see if any of my questions were answered. 

Short answer: No.

Instead, I found a lot of strong opinions on this book. One of the most interesting ones to me was this: People really hated Johnny. Some people said they stopped reading the book because they couldn’t stand him. I could understand disliking a character being a reason to not finish a book, but something about disliking Johnny being the reason shocked me. Was it because I liked him? No. I think he was a miserable character, but I have to agree with the people who replied to the many people who hated Johnny when they said ‘That’s the point. You’re not supposed to like him.’

That’s what makes him an interesting character to me. He isn’t especially likable, and he doesn’t become more likable as he falls deeper into madness. Instead, you start to understand why he is the way he is. By understanding him I don’t think you begin to like him more, but understanding sort of is a shortcut to creating sympathy.  Now that I know how messed up his childhood was, I can see how a person ends up where he is and how he reacts to what’s happening to him. Does this mean he’s a good person now? No, but he is an interesting character. Is this me saying that everyone who chose not to finish HoL because of Johnny is wrong and needs to go back and read it and sympathize with him? Absolutely not. Instead I want to ask a question: How can we as writers create unlikeable characters that enthrall readers? You know, the love to hate type? Or characters that are love-ably miserable? 

The closest example of this in my own writing is Akashi. When I first created Akashi’s character (goodness me, it’ll be six years ago soon), he was honestly too… good. Good at everything. Too smart, too clever, too full of quips, too everything. He was this flawless sad boy. Then as I wrote him more, I realized that by being who he is, he is an extremely flawed character. He is reckless, he is careless, his personal life is a mess, he doesn’t know who he is outside of this innate need to always be fighting something. From the beginning he’s a loveable trouble maker. That’s the goal at least, you tell me if I did it well. But I don’t think anyone loves to hate him or finds him so unbearable that they would stop reading what I put out into the world. But that’s because I acknowledge him as the protagonist and give him redeeming qualities. That’s the difference here. I don’t think I’d want to be friends with Akashi, but he’s still one of my favorite characters. He isn’t unlikeable, but he if he were real, he wouldn’t be anyone's best friend I don’t think. And yet for all his flaws, Akashi is the clear cut protagonist of his story. With Johnny it isn’t so simple.

Johnny is for all intents and purposes the HoL protagonist, and yet his redeeming qualities are few and far between. For me that works because he is an extremely flawed, unreliable narrator, whose true story only comes out in the moments where he admits he’s lying, or in the parts of the story he has no control over. And to be clear, Johnny is the protagonist because we see the world through his eyes, not because he is a hero in the story. He isn’t malicious enough to be an antagonist (unless you trust the psychosis-esque rantings of what he does to those people at the end of the book, but I personally think that’s all in his own mind), and the story is from his perspective. I could understand for all those reasons why people wouldn’t like him, but he worked for me because I understand him and why he is such a miserable protagonist.

I understand why he acted the way he did. I understand the lies on top of lies. I understand his slow unraveling. I’m not saying people who didn’t like Johnny must not have understood. Maybe they did and they just didn’t like what that meant. Maybe it reminded them too much of someone they knew. Or maybe they thought it wasn’t realistic. I honestly don’t know, because I will never begin to act like I understand why people like or dislike such complex things. But for me, I think the answer here is understanding.

Circling back to Akashi as my example, when I was trying to create a loveable rogue as I fleshed him out, I accidentally made him an absolutely awful person. Like murderer level bad. Don’t get me wrong, he has killed some people - he was a soldier in a bloody war and all that - but we’re talking like unprovoked murder. Does not make for a likable character. If I can't understand why somebody would do an awful thing, it makes them a lot less likable immediately. So if Akashi were to go around killing people while making clever quips… well that doesn’t sound very good at all. 

To make another comparison, a lot of the things people complained about were the strange sex scenes Johnny would intercede with (yep, they’re back). Some people found it obnoxious and gross and weird. I understand why they felt that way, but instead of thinking that, I asked myself ‘Wait, what does this mean?’ And that helped me get to the next point. Not just what it means in the story, but what does it mean for Johnny’s character? Why would Johnny start bragging and fantasizing and picking up women to sleep with so often?

If you think it’s because he’s an annoying asshole, then it makes him a lot less likable. But what if he did it because he was scared? He was so afraid to be alone, and he was so disconnected from others and an understanding of love that the only way he knew how to connect with others was through sex.

Now that doesn’t sound healthy, but it does sound like a damn good reason to sympathize with his erratic behavior. See, the actions he take doesn’t make Johnny a likable character. It’s the reason he makes those decisions that make him a good character to me. If I can justify why a character is doing something, then I can like them as a character. Does that mean I want them to be my best friend? Absolutely not. But his decisions make sense, and that makes him a likable character to me even if I don’t like him. Maybe that won’t work for everyone, but I think that is how I can make characters that are likable. Make their actions make sense, and make their choices - no matter how bad or strange or annoying they are - seem like something that character would do. Or more basically: Make it make sense!

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Novelty

This is a shorter passage, but I think it's worth discussing anyways. One of the things that draws people to HoL is novelty. It's written in a very unique and fascinating style that would be extremely difficult to replicate, but all that fun novelty doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the fundamentals down. You can’t just come out with this fun unique style of writing where you have readers turning the book upside down, reading backwards, sifting through seemingly meaningless words trying to find purpose, and who knows what else if you don’t just have a solid, good, well thought out story.

I know how simple that sounds, but I feel like it's important to remember. Who cares about all the flashy fun stuff if you can’t tell a good story? Why would it matter what Johnny’s mother wrote him in her strange confusing style if it wasn’t for the fact that what she had to say and the world in which she said it wasn’t interesting? Who would care about Will Navidson climbing the stairs for possibly days at a time if not for the fact that we want him to see his family again? Why would we bother reading the crawl space getting smaller and smaller around him if not for the fact that we were invested in if he survived or not? 

My point is that being flashy or interesting could be a good way to draw in an audience, but the reason it worked here isn’t because of the novelty of the style but because even without all the flair, the story is still intriguing and unique! Be as novel as you’d like, but remember that you still need to tell a good story. I don’t think I have the ability to write something as complex as Danielewski did here with HoL, but I do think in some ways I’m still trying to master the fundamentals. Maybe I never will, but that’s okay because I’m here for the joy I get out of writing. I can sort of apply this to my own work though.

The world of Astra is relatively novel I think. I believe Astra is a unique world conceptually with unique stories to be told inside of it, but just because it’s unique doesn’t mean it's good. I have to actually tell a good story within the novel world. A good idea is just the beginning. Then you have to actually apply the novel world to writing an intriguing story. I think that takes time if I’m being honest. The novel idea came first in my case. I started writing stories, but they didn’t start off very good at all. It took me a few years to get there, and now I do think Astra is a relatively solid world with fairly good stories being told within it, but if I just had an interesting novel setting, that wouldn’t be enough. The story has to be good. Especially as a lone writer. No one else is going to build the jungle gym on your playground. You’ve got to set the parameters and create within them. 

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The problem of evil

Okay, this is a bonus section for anyone who has read the book. If you haven’t read the book, feel free to stick around, but be warned: Major spoilers ahead.

As I said before, I went online and saw people complaining about Johnny. I also found this thread of people saying they didn’t understand the ending of HoL. Why did the house let the Navidsons go? Why did it let Karen enter the darkness and return with Will? In fact, some people even said the house was evil so why did it let them get away?

The one thing I didn’t see anyone say in reply was simply this: The house isn’t evil. To me, if you think the house is evil, then you’re misunderstanding the story in some key ways. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on this but I’ll give you my general thoughts real quick. The house isn’t evil, but is instead a reflection of the people who are experiencing the house. The house is inherently neutral, and is only reacting to the behaviors of those inside. Danielewski tried to make a point of this multiple times in the story. Here’s some examples:

•  During the shootout scene inside the hallways the doors all around them begin to open and shut violently. That’s the only time we really actively see the house react. 

• As Will is exploring alone on his bike and thinking of how difficult it will be to bike up and down the corridors, the corridors become slanted, helping him to ride only downhill.

• Will himself thinks that when expedition 4 enters, the reason that the stairwell becomes impossibly long is because the expedition was in search of something so the house gave them something to find.

• And again, the most interesting example to me: Karen wanted Will back, and first the house returned Will’s equipment to her so she could see what became of him. Then the house allowed her to enter the darkness, then released her with Will in hand.

There are many more examples of this, but my point is that the house is a direct reflection of the people who enter its halls. It was never about the house being good or evil. Instead, it is about the house morphing to match the people who are in the throes of experiencing the house. It isn’t that the house is an evil entity, it's that the house is matching the psychological unease of the people it latches onto. In fact, one of the most interesting things to me is that almost none of the things that go wrong in the house is because of the house. Instead it's because of this obsession that is developed in those who try to comprehend it. The house is almost like this innate reflection of the darkness within each person. That darkness becomes accentuated around them as it is accentuated within them like a never ending feedback loop.

The house isn’t doing anything but changing. It’s everyone else’s reactions that harm others. The house is inherently dangerous by its existence alone, but because it is an inhospitable place, not because it is actively attacking people.

Allow me to admit though, there is one flaw in my argument. Tom Navidson is the only character in the story who actively dies because of the house. Though we don’t know Tom’s fate for certain, we know that the ground opens up beneath him and he is never seen again. We can assume like everyone else who becomes lost in the house, he has died, but did he die because of the house? Or did he die because he was trapped inside and something happened to him in there? We don’t really know, but that uncertainty is in fact enough to blow my house of cards down.

So maybe I’m missing some pieces to this puzzle. If you want to agree, disagree, or help me find the missing piece to my puzzle, I’m all ears! But my point is simple: The house is no more evil than the people who entered. And we know they aren’t evil. We know they’re flawed humans struggling with a multitude of personal issues, but they are not evil. To interpret the house as evil is to interpret those who enter it as evil, but I think there’s a difference between evil and flawed. 

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Conclusion

Going into HoL, I didn’t really think I’d be able to take anything away from it. Genuinely, I thought it would be so impossible to translate to my own writing, that I’d have to let the experience take me away without another thought. I was wrong though. There’s plenty to learn and think about here. This is a story worth considering and discussing and learning from. 

One of my favorite things about finishing this story was as I finished reading it, I thought to myself “I understand.” What did I understand? As silly as it sounds, I understood everything. I understood why people loved it, hated it, didn’t get it, wanted to read it again, wanted to take notes, didn’t finish it, all the above. Everything I had heard and continue to hear to this day makes sense. I understand how you could miss some specific messages. I understand how you could take something different away than I did (which isn’t going to stop me from arguing my point in the specific case above). I understand why this book has the following it does. And I also understand why people are intimidated by this book, but I want to remind you that it is really just like any other book. It tries to play around with, make you question your experience, and confuse you, but it is still a book, and it’s still worth reading. I think even if you end up disliking this book, you can learn a lot and think a lot in a way that makes it worth the read.

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Thank you so much for reading! Please, I’m dying to discuss this book with people, so give me your thoughts in the comments! If you disagree, agree, have a different perspective, I’d be happy to hear it!

Next week chapter 3 of The Apocalypse Saga is coming out! If you’re interested in my own fiction, feel free to check that out or if you want more stories in the world of Astra, check out the Astra playlist!

If you’re new here and you like horror (as you may if you read House of Leaves), maybe consider checking out my horror playlist! Dare I say that they aren’t too bad at all? Some may even be good!

I’ll see you next week with chapter 3! Until then, subscribe if you’d like (six away from 200!!!) or leave a tip if you have the ability and the inclination! Catch you all around!