Tag Archives: 5 star

Review: Double Feature by Owen King

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Book: Double Feature

Author: Owen King

Published: March 2013 by Scribner, 419 pages

Date Read: April 2013

First Line: ”The steel-on-steel whisk of the curtain rings scraping along the rod seemed to come from the sky, and for the last seven or eight seconds of his dream, Sam Dolan found himself turning in a circle, searching for the source of the sound, but there was no one else in the vast parking lot.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 well-known indie actors brandishing a replica of Bilbo’s sword Sting purchased from SkyMall with an (ZOMG!) actual, glow-in-the-dark blade!

Review: In 2006, I found a copy of Owen King’s We’re All in This Together on the library’s New Release shelf. It was excellent. So excellent, in fact, once I finished it, I turned right around and purchased myself a copy to own (which luckily I don’t do very often, as my bookshelves are overloaded to the breaking point and there is no room in here for even one more. Not even a TINY additional bookshelf. I’ve checked. I’ve measured. NO MORE ROOM.)

I waited patiently (fine, you guys know me, I wasn’t at all patient, I stalked his author page like a creeper) to see what King would produce next, and selfishly hoped it would be a longer work – if he’d won me over so completely with his short stories (and one haunting novella), I was eager to see what he’d do with a lengthier work.

I was completely in the right to be anticipatory.

Double Feature is one of those books where you not only fall in love with the characters, you get to know them. They’re very real. Flaws-and-all real. I love characters that are just like people I’d meet in my own life. People in books are all too often either ALL GOOD or ALL BAD or they’re VERY VERY GOOD with ONE FATAL FLAW or they’re just A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING ELSE or what have you, and that gets tiresome, because real live people walking around on the earth, just trying their hardest to not screw it up too badly? We’re not all good, or all bad, or a metaphor for anything. We’re a gray area. We sometimes spectacularly mess things up, to the point of not being able to fix them. We sometimes are capable of great things. And we sometimes stagnate and just go about our day-to-day and go to work and live our lives and try really hard to keep our heads above water. That’s what real people do. And that’s what the people in this book do, and oh, did I love them for it.

Sam Dolan is a young, optimistic filmmaker when we first meet him, working on his very first production: an indie piece called Who We Are. His father is Booth Dolan, an over-the-top B-movie actor who Sam has never felt close to. His mother, Allie, has recently passed away and Sam hasn’t gotten over it yet. And then something happens with his movie, and I can’t tell you what it is, because the reveal of that was so brilliantly written that I actually half-covered my face and said, “Oh. Oh, no, oh, shit, no, really? SHIT.” And may have laughed a little, because that’s what you do when something is really, really uncomfortable. (Well, it’s what I do, anyway.)

The book moves between times; to Sam’s childhood, to years after the movie situation. We meet the players in Sam’s life: his roommate Wesley, who writes a review blog for things people send him and refuses to leave the house; his ex-girlfriend Polly who hasn’t quite settled into the ex role yet and her burly Germanic baseball-player husband Jo-Jo; Sam’s bitterly brilliant half-sister Mina; his godfather Tom, who can’t stop building rooms onto his sprawling house, even though he lives there alone; and Tess, the television producer who might just be a match for Sam’s tendency to run away from anything resembling a commitment.

These people are real, and flawed, and fantastic. You want to invite them over for dinner (and maybe hide the knives before they arrive.) You want to spend time with them, talking to them and getting to know them and laughing with them and being a part of their lives. There’s a feel of Irving to these people; that same lovable misfit quality, that same fierce love you feel for them when you get to know them. The book is also very intelligent, very witty, and very wise. And at one point there’s a little poetry, and you know how that wins me over, right? (Spoiler alert in case you don’t know: it does. It very much does.)

I sped through the book this week, because I wanted to know what happened. But that meant it was going to end. And I didn’t want it to end. So I was torn between wanting to finish and never, ever wanting to finish. I suppose there are worse things to happen in the world; I just know turning the last page made me very melancholy, because it was done.

I’m lucky enough to be going to see the author read from the book tomorrow night and will be getting my (sadly, water-damaged, as I was caught in a rainstorm last week with it, stupid rainstorm) copy of the book signed tomorrow night. The characters get to live on for one more day for me, in the author’s voice, no less. I have no complaints about that. I’ll be glad to meet up with them again.

Review: Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

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Book: Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Author: Carol Rifka Brunt

Published: June 2012 by The Dial Press, 368 pages

First Line: ”My sister, Greta, and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that morning because he knew he was dying.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 teenage girls who dream of becoming falconers so they can learn how to keep those they love from flying away

Review: I have a love for beautiful cover art. This is some sincerely beautiful cover art. However, we all know that, as they say, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and I’m sure you’ve all been led astray by some flashy cover art (or a person with a rakish smile hiding a wolfish heart.)

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is one of the best books I’ve read in…weeks. Months. Possibly almost a year. I don’t know that anything I can say about this book can do it justice, but I knew I couldn’t not review it, because I want you all to read it. Immediately. As soon as you can get your hands on it. It’s just that good. It’s absolutely luminous. Is there such a thing as a perfect book? Probably not. Nothing’s perfect. But this one comes about as close as anything does.

June Elbus is thirteen. In the throes of awkwardness. Lumbering where the rest of her family is willowy and perfect. The only person that understands her, truly understands her, is her uncle Finn: a kindred spirit, a kind soul, her godfather, an artist who lives in a jewel of an apartment in New York City. It is 1986 and Uncle Finn is dying from a new disease that no one knows much about, other than it’s scary and communicable: AIDS. And when he goes, June is left alone, adrift, with no one to talk to, no one to share things with, no one who sees the real person behind her eyes. She worries no one ever will come close. “…once you had a friend like Finn, it was almost impossible to find someone…who came anywhere close.  Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close,” June muses. And with those words, she had my heart. I’ve lost people like this. I’m still looking for them. I still miss them.

Once Finn dies, the truth starts coming out. Who Finn really was. Who he really loved. Why June’s mother was so conflicted. Why June’s sister Greta has become so distant, so cruel. Who the tall man with the sad eyes was, banned from Finn’s funeral. How you can keep going, even though your heart is broken. How deep our capacity for love is, how our hearts are so vast, so filled with forgiveness and humanity and kindness and secrets that we keep for the good of all that are involved. How there are infinite different types of love in the world, and how they are all valid. How they are all to be honored, all to be repected.

I devoured this book in two days while working the light booth for a play at my theater. I wept almost every third page at some discovered beauty, at some poetic turn of phrase, at a beautiful idea or creative turn Brunt took with the narrative. I loved the characters. I felt their pain. I wanted to lift them, whole-cloth, from the words and put them safely in my pockets.

“Maybe you could read something else,” the director of the play asked me the second night, worried because of the previous night’s tears, when I put out my book and a supply of Kleenex in preparation for finishing the novel. “I need to know what happens,” I said. “I can’t pick up anything else until I know.” He smiled and laughed and nodded. (He’s currently reading The Dark Tower series; he’s deep into Roland and his ka-tet. He understands needing to know what happens.)

This book rightly was given high accolades last year; it deserved every one. I lost count of the passages I marked and wrote down to peruse later. I lost count of the times I dissolved into tears over something that rang so true with me it was like I was the bell and the book was the clapper. It’s early in the year; I’m sure I’ll find something this beautiful before 2013 peters out on us in a fine haze of glitter and confetti and fireworks. But for the time being, I’m going to let this one resonate for a while. I’m going to let June’s wolves howl in my heart as long as they want.

Rob writes a review! No Alternative by William Dickerson

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Book: No Alternative

Author: William Dickerson

Published: April 5, 2012 by Kettle of Letters Press

First Line: “Suicide is a universally human phenomenon.”

Rating: 5/5 Stewart Copeland Tama Signature Snare Drums

(A review copy was provided by the author.)

No Alternative is one of those sparkling little independent gems that makes you want to stand up celebrate your literacy….with cake and punch.

Perhaps I feel that way because it’s my kind of read. Or perhaps it’s just a damn brilliant little book, The subject of music in novels, particularly rock, does tend to thrill me, possibly because it delineates bits and pieces of my own experience. And possibly because it’s so rare. I can name, off the top of my head, only two other books that used rock as a theme.

Music is only a vehicle for this book. It is far less about grunge or punk or rap than it is about why this music bubbles to the surface of society the way it does, why it takes hold of you as a teen and becomes a way of life. It isn’t about the music itself, it’s about why we listen to it, how it makes us all feel a little less fragile in a great big scary world, and why we feel so fragile to begin with–ideas that Mr. Dickerson has hidden underneath his, I suspect, deliberately misleading synopsis. While the book takes place in 1994, some months after Kurt Cobain’s death, it serves only as a focal point; Cobain’s spirit serves as a sort of guide. Not in the sense that he’s a character in the book, just as something you’ll keep in the back of your mind as you read. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a child of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80′s, or ’90s, this book will speak to you. The guiding spirit could just as easily be Hendrix or Morrison. As I said, it’s not about the music, it’s about why we need it.

I wont say more than that since this is one of those books where the experience would be ruined by even the most inadvertent of spoilers. And, speaking briefly of spoilers, I should warn you that if you decide to get your mitts on this book and happen to stroll off to Amazon to acquire it, do not, I repeat, DO NOT read the reviews of it therein, unless you enjoy having the whole of a book handed to you on a plate before you even ‘go to checkout’. This is a book that would particularly suffer from any in-depth review. (Cretins. What IS the damn point of reading a book like this, a book that can so adroitly fuck with your perceptions, if some idiot ‘helpfully’ gives you a goddamn book report on it that includes the whole damn plot?) I can be only thankful that I read these silly reviews after I finished it and not before. Go into it cold, people. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it far more.

But now, let’s leave the story, and plots, and stupid reviews, and go briefly to the nuts and bolts of the book.

Characters: every one etched with the brutal clarity of a razor blade and shining as bright as a diamond. These characters breathe. You’ve met them. Convincing, compelling, they are about as real as fictional characters can get.

Humor: sad and cynical, and often painful.

Writing: direct, sympathetic, and not a little cunning. My emotions were engaged from the first line (in fact, the first line pissed me off) and didn’t let up once til the end and all without making me feel as if I were being blatantly manipulated. That’s a personal pet peeve of mine, one that would likely make a good topic for Reading Rage. I don’t like it when my emotions are being jerked around in an obvious way, which Mr. Dickerson does not do. He writes his story and leaves it up to you to feel. Or not. But I did say he was cunning, yes? You won’t notice it though, not til the end.

And when you finish No Alternative, I predict that, as I did myself, you’ll go back to page one and read it all over again.

You should read this: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon

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Book: The Polish Boxer

Author: Eduardo Halfon (translated by Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead, and Anne McLean)

Published: October 2012 by Bellevue Literary Press

First line: “I was pacing among them, moving up and down between the rows of desks as if trying to find my way out of a labyrinth.”

Rating: 4.85/5 pirouettes, which may or may not mean anything to the Gypsies

(Advance reader copy provided by Bellevue Literary Press)

I would like to preface this review by saying that I am half in love with Eduardo Halfon now, and I’m eager to see his other work translated into English–like, tomorrow. I will buy them. I will.

I don’t know what I was expecting of The Polish Boxer. The offer to read it came by way of me pointing out the book Inukshuk to Amy, which I thought she might enjoy; Bellevue Literary Press said, hey, would you be interested in reading The Polish Boxer? Amy passed it along to me, and I’m so thankful for this bit of happenstance.

The blurb on the back of the book is a bit misleading. The summary describes it like it’s a book of unrelated stories–well, partially related because they share the same narrator–but gossamer threads run through the book, tying the stories together into a work that reads less like a book of short stories and more like a memoir by Anthony Bourdain mixed with tones of Kerouac. Halfon, the narrator of his own book, reads like a man with an unsettled past and a slow fire in his guts. He is a man who is easily haunted. He might be just a touch jaded.

It’s unclear how much of this work is fiction and how much is true. We know some of it is true–maybe all of it, there’s no disclaimer or classification that I can see. It doesn’t really matter. The Polish Boxer is gorgeous. When I read the title story, I was sitting at a coffee shop with my husband, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I got mist-eyed even though I was sitting next to a busy intersection where people could totally see me cry. (If I had been at home, I would have bawled.)

Halfon’s characters (and it feels weird to call them characters because I assume they are real people) all enchant the reader–Lía, who draws her orgasms; Juan Kalel, a brilliant poet confined by life in a tiny village; his grandfather, who always told his grandchildren that the number tattooed on his arm was his phone number, so he wouldn’t forget it–but the one that sticks with you hard is Milan Rakic, a half-Serbian half-Gypsy pianist who introduces himself to Eduardo in a bar one night. Rakic is the focus of three major stories in the collection (plus a small interlude), and with good reason: he’s captivating–or, at least, Halfon thinks he’s captivating, and shows us that side of Rakic. We fall down the rabbit hole with Halfon, who eventually finds himself in Belgrade, seeking out the wandering pianist in the book’s longest story, “The Pirouette”. We come away emotionally upturned, and that’s okay.

I still feel steeped in Halfon’s language and imagery. I want to wrap it around me like silk. I want to submerge myself like it’s a bath of warm cream, and maybe swim around a bit.

The Polish Boxer is sexy; it’s moving; it’s a little bit in the gutter, but it’s looking up at the stars. I don’t ever tell you that you must read a book, but I’m strongly urging you to pick up a copy of this one. It may become one of my all-time favorites.

 

 

 

Review: Americas by Jason Lee Norman

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Lori from TNBBC asked us if we wanted to take part in the Americas blog tour. Amy, smitten with one of the author’s short stories, had already asked him if she could review his book, so it seemed the stars were aligned! The first post of the tour is an essay for Lori’s “On Being Indie” series by Jason Lee Norman. We’re next on the list, woo! If you’re interested in finding out more about this book, Lori will be tweeting the links from @TNBBC.

Book: Americas 

(ePub or paperback available at author’s website)

Author: Jason Lee Norman

Published: April 2012 by Wufniks Press, 55 pages

Date Read: June 2012

First Line: ”In Canada they teach Canadian history to their people in dramatic vignettes that air between commercials during Jeopardy reruns.”

Genre/Rating: Short stories; 5/5 Paul Newmans (of an indeterminate age) hiding out in Bolivia, waiting to listen to all of your prayers

(Copy provided by the author)

Review: Lori at TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog posted a short story by Jason Lee Norman in early June, and I was just blown away. He had such a poetic use of language and such a mastery of it – such beauty in such few words – that I wanted more. I went to his website and read the sample story from this collection and knew I had to read it. “You know,” Susie said, “you can email the author and ask if he’d send us a review copy.” What? I thought. What dark sorcery is this? This is a thing a book reviewer can do? So I thought, I will try this. This is a thing I will try! And it worked! It was like magic! Wee little book-loving Amy who still lives deep inside of me would be so impressed with grown-up Amy right now.

Even better? This book was WONDERFUL. One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Americas is a collection of short stories, one for each of the 22 countries in the Americas. Each story is 1 to 4 pages long. The book is small; about the length of your hand. Each story feels like it was polished and edited until it shone like a jewel, and then placed into the perfect setting of the beautiful little book. The typeset is gorgeous. The design is gorgeous. It’s a feast for the eyes, this book.

The stories are hard to describe. They’re part fairy tale, part magic realism, part prose poetry. There’s a very Allende or Márquez feel to the writing, which of course works well when writing about Latin American countries. (And, since I’m an unabashed Allende and Márquez fangirl, I was delighted with the similarity in tone.) The author uses the run-on sentence in a way I’ve never seen before: he uses it masterfully, beautifully, like a child would use it, to show abandon and release. Some of them make you laugh with their whimsy and childlike wonder; some of them tear your heart out with the beauty and the truth hiding behind the exaggeration of the words. The last story, the last paragraph? I had tears at the spare, haunting beauty of it. The author knows how to pack a punch, and knows very well how to leave you with his words echoing in your mind.

I wanted to give you a couple of examples of his prose, to show you some of the gorgeous writing in the collection. I seriously want to start handing this out to people as if I’m a door-to-door Bible salesman, I’m most serious. But then I realized, if I do, you won’t discover his words in their native habitat, surrounded by the other words, where they belong. His stories are so sparse, and edited so perfectly, that if I pull some of the sentences that resonated with me most strongly, they’re going to pale out of context. You need to read them where they belong. You need to come upon them like I did, unspoiled, unexpecting, so that when you read them for the first time, you are surprised and startled and, ultimately, completely satisfied.

I want you all to read this. I want you all to be as delighted and emotional and filled with wonder with this collection as I was.

It is books like this that make being a reader an utter and absolute joy.

Review, IB Favorites Edition: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

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Nearly everyone who loves to read has those books that they’ve read and re-read until the binding fell apart and the edges became so worn that the book forms a wedge shape–or did, until it disintegrated. The IB Favorites Edition review covers those books that we have literally loved to pieces.

Book: Good Omens

Authors: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Published: 1990 by Gollancz (UK) / Workman (US), 288 pages

Date Read: More instances than are able to be catalogued

First Lines: ”It was a nice day.”

Genre/Rating: Fantasy/Satire/Apocalyptic humor, 5/5 Really Cool People

Bookslut who hearts this book: greengeekgirl

Review: Gaiman and Pratchett decided one day  that it would be jolly good fun to collaborate on a novel.  Gaiman had written the first part of Good Omens himself, but hit the all-too-familiar Writer’s Block that often dooms a project–but not this time. Pratchett rang him up one day and said, “I know what happens next.”  What happened next was a blessing to readers around the globe, forevermore until the end of time: they wrote a book that can stand proudly next to the works of Douglas Adams, and possibly push his books a little bit down the shelf to have some more preening room.

The story unfolds around the coming apocalypse. All of heaven and hell are racing toward the end of time, hungry for The Final Conflict, the Antichrist come to earth, the Four Horseman and all that–only, there is something in the way. Two somethings, really: an angel and a demon, Aziraphale and Crowley, who had been banished to earth centuries ago. In their time on earth, the somewhat unlikely pair had become sort-of friends–as much as an angel can become friends with a demon–and had become rather fond of humans and their creations. Upon realizing that there would be no sushi in heaven or classic cars in hell, the pair decided that they would do what they could to prevent the Antichrist, who had just been born, from fulfilling the prophecy and thereby leading to the destruction of Earth.  Simple, right?

Only, there were a few mix-ups. Apocalyptic mix-ups.

Good Omens takes you on a ride that is relentlessly fun. The fellas claim that Pratchett did most of the physical writing, and it is true that much of the book contains his zany, sharply satiric sense of humor; Gaiman’s voice comes through strong and clear, though, especially when dealing with some of the darker, more underworldly characters, such as the Four Horsemen. (And the maggots–apparently, Neil is quite proud of the maggots.) In fact, to hear the guys talk of writing the book, they were struggling just as mightily as the forces of Good and Evil–only, they were racing each other to write “the good bits” of the book before the other one could.  As Gaiman said about the writing battle in a 1991 interview, “We both have egos the size of planetary cores.” All of this comes through when you’re reading; you can tell that the authors had magnificent, exhausting fun. It’s the kind of book that requires a post-reading cigarette.

Photo from Locus Online.

I also have to confess that I enjoy the fact that it’s a send-up of religion. But it’s not angry, bitter, or less-holy-than-thou. Gaiman said about the blasphemous overtones in Good Omens:

“One of the great things about humor is, you can slip things past people with humor, you can use it as a sweetener. So you can actually tell them things, give them messages, get terribly, terribly serious and terribly, terribly dark, and because there are jokes in there, they’ll go along with you, and they’ll travel a lot further along with you than they would otherwise.”

I, for one, will always travel all the way to the end with these gents, even after I’ve read this book a hundred more times. It’s just that good.

Dueling Reviews: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Dueling reviews?  What the hell is that?

Even though the booksluts often read completely different books–mostly because neither of us is any good at taking recommendations, even from each other–we occasionally badger each other into reading a book that the other one wants to read, or decide that we’re both interested in reading the same book.  When that happens, you get a two-fer: two bookslut reviews for the price of one.  Which is always free.  But whatever.

Of course, that doesn’t always mean we’re going to agree on the book.  (See also: Catcher in the Rye.) But there’s one thing we agree on when it comes to House of Leaves–namely, that this book is seriously creeptastic. Perfect for a spooky read near Halloween.

Book: House of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Published: 2000 by Pantheon/Random House

Susie’s rating: 5/5 hallways hidden in your house

Rob’s rating: 5/5

Recommended listening: Danielewski’s sister, the recording artist Poe, created an album that was inspired by reading the book as he was writing it.  According to Wikipedia, Rolling Stone gave it a pretty bleak review (two stars), and I haven’t personally actually listened to it all the way through  . . . so, erm, I guess this isn’t so much “recommended” listening as a bit of trivia. If anybody has listened to this or does decide to listen to it, please report back with your findings!

Susie’s review: For starters: If you are offended by graphic sexual scenes, this isn’t the book for you.  If you are an impatient reader, you should probably leave this on the shelf.  If you can’t read Stephen King even in the daytime without getting the creeps, walk on by.  House of Leaves is an eerie postmodern tome that, while ultimately satisfying, will take you on more than a few twists and turns and may leave you wanting a nightlight.

Footnote 139 contains a translation from Seneca’s Epistulae morales 44:  “This is what happens when you hurry through a maze; the faster you go, the worse you are entangled.”  Whether this inclusion is coincidental, a message to the reader, or a bit of a joke by Danielewski, the quote accurately describes the experience of reading House of Leaves, which is a frame story extreme: we read through the eyes of Johnny Truant, who is exploring the writings of Zampanò, whose focus is the story of the Navidson/Green family and the house they inhabit on Ash Tree Lane–a house that amazes its new owners by having an unexpected growth spurt, resulting in larger rooms, new doorways, hallways, and whole new rooms that weren’t there the day before.  The story kicks off in the middle, when Zampanò dies and Johnny Truant inherits the old man’s body of work–work which turns out to be more interesting than Johnny ever expected. The deeper Johnny goes into the story about the house on Ash Tree Lane, the more disjointed and paranoid he becomes–like Zampanò before him, Johnny becomes fixated on the size of his dwelling, and more importantly, any changes to the size of his dwelling.

The book  presents itself at first almost as an anti-horror novel–not only not trying to convince you that it could really happen, but also going to great lengths to assure you that it is in no way based in reality.  Although he provides the base of the narrative and all of the “facts” that drive the story, we never meet Zampanò and the conclusions we can draw about him are fluid at best. We do know that Zampanò was a blind man who spent hours describing, in minute visual detail, a video recording that Johnny asserts does not and has never existed; thus, Zampanò doesn’t lend a lot of credibility to his research.  Further breaking down the text’s legitimacy, Johnny impresses upon us early that he is making his own mark on the narrative, on purpose or accidentally; it’s unclear to the reader what details Johnny may or may not have changed or omitted when putting together the book.  The evidence against this house, the video, or the Navidson/Green family existing steadily mounts as we go deeper into the text.

And yet.

As Johnny Truant begins to have creepy experiences in the real world, and as that creepiness escalates into full-blown horror, the assertions that the Navidsons’ story is fictional, that the house on Ash Tree Lane doesn’t exist, crumble against all reason.  As you read, you become less certain–did the house exist?  Or didn’t it?  Is it real? And, will I experience the same things Johnny and Zampanò experienced by handling this text?  It’s the same sense of almost-reality that you get from The Blair Witch Project or The Ring–especially the latter, where there’s that tiny part of you that fully believes the video is dangerous, and that you are in danger from having seen it, even through the lens of another camera.

This is the labyrinth that is the story; charging through and trying to read it as a straightforward narrative will do nothing but confuse the reader.  With three different stories to keep straight, and three different people (well, two people and the “editors”) making their marks on the story, House of Leaves must be unwoven cautiously and meticulously.  In doing so, you become Johnny, Zampanò, and even Navidson–exploring the book rather than reading it, while the story changes shape around you.  And then, after dark, you might feel the little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.  And you might feel the need to get your measuring tape out and double-check the size of your room.

Just in case.

Rob’s review:  What in the world could possibly be creepy about an expanding house?

Actually, it sounds pretty nifty, doesn’t it? More closet space! But then the closet space starts swallowing people…

That’s the thing about House of Leaves; for all its seemingly over-indulgence of gimmickry, its red ink (a killer on the eyes, I should mention… I walked away half blind after a session with it), its changing fonts, carpal-tunnel inducing layouts that have you contorting the book like a pretzel, its insane footnotes…within more footnotes…within more fucking footnotes, the various narratives that follow their distinctive stories regardless of being linked together, it is still a subtle book, and all without the veneer of smugness from the writer that afflicts most other gimmicky literature. Unlike genre-horror fiction that builds its suspense in a contrived and obvious way, Leaves instead insinuates itself into your mind and your gut like some sort of emotional parasite, and you realize the reason it does is precisely because of the contortions within the pages. Without them House of Leaves wouldn’t work, despite its excellent writing, because those contortions reflect the narrative like a mirror and that is how the story seeps into your mind and gut to wreak havoc there, and by the end of it you become so paranoid and edgy that you’ll swear the damn book, an inanimate object, is actually alive and expanding like the house within its pages… it’s alive, and it’s watching you…

Huh…creepy, indeed. It’s why I keep my copy in a closet where I don’t have to look at it.

We’re told by Danielewski himself that the book is more love story than horror story, and that is likely true, genre-wise; but this ‘love story’ is full of the paranoia and strain of a disintegrating relationship and the sheer terror of what’s happening to them. It’s not the sort of book to give you the warm fuzzies on Valentine’s day. You’ll need to stick to genre-romance for that.

Literature, history, architecture, philosophy, film, culture, psychology, criticism, physics, House of Leaves, in the best post-modern vein, is a kitchen sink of a book, sure to alarm, frustrate, amuse, provoke, and entertain.

And creep you the hell out.

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Off-topic here, but since this is my first blog post for IB, I thought, since my blog-partner mentioned that I might be taken for a Him rather than a Her because of my avatar picture, I’d set the record straight now and say that I’m every bit as much a slut as my blog-partner. That’s Dave Grohl in my avatar, and I just like looking at him. — Rob

It’s true, she really, really likes looking at him. A lot. — Susie