House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski, an American author, made his debut with House of Leaves, which Pantheon Books published in March 2000. It has been translated into several languages, and a companion piece, The Whalestoe Letters, followed. The book is written as epistolary fiction and metafiction.

A family discovers that their house is bigger inside than it is outside, and that the extra space keeps growing. Their attempts to measure it and film it become a documentary called The Navidson Record, which the novel presents as an American cultural phenomenon released in 1993. The text around that record is assembled from a monograph by a blind academic, Zampanò, which the primary narrator, Johnny Truant, recovers and transcribes.

Truant's footnotes chronicle his own life and his efforts to make sense of the manuscript, so the book has several layers: the film, the academic study of it and the transcription of that study. The pages are set with unusual typography, and some sections are arranged so that the layout carries part of the meaning. Danielewski uses the apparatus of scholarship as a fictional device.

The novel makes heavy use of multiple perspectives and unreliable narration, and it deliberately leaves the status of The Navidson Record uncertain. It is a standalone work.