I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to taboo things. Naturally, this inclination for the extreme has led me to develop an insatiable hunger for horror. Yet, the more horror I consume through YouTube docuseries, A21 films, and other peculiar ARGs, the less viscerally I feel the fear of each tale grip me.

All that said, there hasn’t been a piece of media lately that has haunted the empty spaces of my thoughts as much as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (March 2000).

It’s one thing to discuss the festering horrors of the titular house the entire book is framed around. It’s a whole other beast to try and understand, let alone decode Danielewski’s masterful layering of the chief narrative. An academic book about a manuscript about a lost documentary detailing a mysterious house. At each level, Danielewski asks, no- pries apart reader’s preconceived expectations of horror stories, to present a truly terrifying piece of work.

This house… is haunted.

I am not someone who regularly pays money to purchase hardcopy books. By my estimation, they are often too bulky, high-maintenance and fragile to bring around on my daily commute. As such, it wasn’t much of a surprise when I casually ignored the multiple pleas online to purchase a physical copy of House of Leaves before perusing its contents.

House of Leaves is the first book to make me reconsider my terrible life choices. A 100 digital pages in, I closed my pdf copy on my phone and ordered it online. This might sound like hyperbole, but seriously, look at this. Could something like this ever be conveyed in an online format?

When you begin to consider that Danielewski has woven the very act of consuming stories through tangible physical documents like books into the narrative, the horrors of what is happening to Johnny Truant really begin to grip you.

Still, what is left when we strip away the literary decoration that dolls up the story? What exactly is so terrifying about the house on Ash Tree lane?

1. The House

Houses don’t die easily. They just wait.

“The Saturday Interview: ‘I Am in Eskew’ podcast”

"If I’m sitting alone at home on a dark and stormy night, and I glance nervously up towards the bedroom doorway, my fear is not that my house is being haunted by a spirit called Mabel who died in the 19th century at the age of fourteen and is constantly seeking her favourite teddy bear… because all of these details both humanise her and make her ridiculous. My fear is that there will be something standing in the doorway, because the doorway is where things come to stand. Because unoccupied spaces, in our imaginations, must find something to fill them."

In Jacob Geller’s fantastic video “Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House”, Geller examines the cultural and historiographical significance of the House. These are places we spend most of our resting hours in. Every night, we entrust our lives to our houses for hours at a time, never considering how our reliance feeds the vulnerability our abodes thrive on.

Interestingly, Geller marks a clear difference between the concept of houses being haunted by ‘something’, and houses being haunted.

Jacob Geller: ‘Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House’

The number of stories about “haunted houses” might as well be infinite, but I want to make a crucial distinction here. There are many many stories about houses that are haunted by something. If a house is haunted by something, then that something can jump out at you and yell “boo!”. But, there’s another kind of house. And while this kind may have provided a stage for violence, death and insanity for humans, those acts were the symptoms, not the cause. Some houses just- reject humanity.

What good can happen when a house is left alone to rot? Put into a perpetual state of torment. Not allowed to die. Forced to exist, forced to feel its insides grow old and decay, fill with filth of all design. It’s really no surprise the house begins to morph, emote in disparate dimensions we cannot even begin to comprehend. Bitter bile collects in the living room. Leprosy infects the walls. Echoes of past denizens bungle up in the hallways. Doorways merge and collapse. The kitchen curls in on itself.

All that said, a pitch-black hallway that isn’t spatially reasonable shouldn’t be that unexpected, should it?

Leviticus 14: 33-38

33 The Lord further spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying: 34 “When you enter the land of Canaan, which I am giving you as a possession, and I put a spot of leprosy on a house in the land of your possession, 35 then the one who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, ‘Something like a spot of leprosy has become visible to me in the house.’ 36 The priest shall then command that they empty the house before the priest goes in to look at the spot, so that everything in the house need not become unclean; and afterward the priest shall go in to look at the house. 37 So he shall look at the spot, and if the spot on the walls of the house has greenish or reddish depressions and appears deeper than the surface, 38 the priest shall come out of the house, to the doorway, and quarantine the house for seven days.

In his video essay, Geller similarly remarks upon this passage in the Bible, which describes how to treat leprosy in a house. While we now know (or pretend to understand) this phenomena as black mold, these descriptions thousands of years past bear a striking resemblance to the seeming portal that has appeared in Navidson’s house in House of Leaves.

“and if the spot on the walls of the house has greenish or reddish depressions and appears deeper than the surface”

In another work that remarks upon a house that has grown to reject humanity, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) details the elastic architecture these resentful residences play with when trying to disturb their human inhabitants.

Shirley Jackson: ‘The Haunting of Hill House’

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

As Kitty Horrorshow’s game ANATOMY (2016) points out, “every house is haunted”.

Kitty Horrorshow: ‘ANATOMY’

When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.

There are a great many things we fear in this world. Fear of the dark, the deep, the sudden and (perhaps the other gender as well). Lovecraftian (cosmic) horror and body horror in particular are some of Junji Ito’s hallmarks. Meanwhile, others would classify the three brands of horror as the scientific, the supernatural and the naturalistic. Just a quick search for ‘list of phobias’ will yield you more than a thousand hits. Evidently, we are a very terrified species. Categorically however, most of these phobias can be bunched under the header ‘fear of the unknown’.

Be it fear of a creature or being that you cannot begin to comprehend or explain, biologically, it makes perfect sense that we be wary of foreign entities. Our ancestors would have had to be suspicious of the unknown to survive in the brutal landscape presented by a prehistoric world where mankind was far from apex predator.

Despite this, or perhaps, to contrast it, domestic horror presents a fear of the familiar.

It’s the kind of horror that seriously messes with you. It burrows underneath your skin, messes with your psyche, presents you with uncertain realities you cannot bear. What if these confounding terrors made their way into your most intimate spaces, infringed upon all barriers you had put up to protect yourself, and weeded its way into your subconscious?

It is this brand of horror that Danielewski’s House of Leaves revels in.

We see the decline of Zampanò, Johnny, and Navidson as they attempt to measure darkness. We can observe the complete wreckage of their mental states when they are confronted with concepts so alien their mortal minds cannot handle it. And this is what terrifies me about the house on Ash Tree lane.

This house… is haunted.

Beyond that, however, is an idea more sinister than the house itself. The idea that there isn’t a malevolent, malicious force playing with our reality, nor that we as a species are caught in the riptide of centrifugal forces which threaten the homes we live in. I might find cosmic and domestic horror- heck, even House of Leaves scary, but I do not fear it.

What truly petrifies me is the human response to these horrors.

In every piece of media brought up here, though most aptly summed up in House of Leaves, the very human protagonist chooses to extend their search into the bounds of the unknown. They know it’s dangerous and inhospitable, yet at the height of hubris, they cannot but help themselves from descending into the depths.

We see it in Will Navidson’s descriptions of an uncontrollable urge to charter the bounds of the dark, shifting hallways that have suddenly infested his home. Multiple times he has barely escaped from the passageways with his life, but his drive to explore never ceases for a minute.

House of Leaves ends with Navidson bumbling down the arcane corridors of the five and a half-minute hallway once more. His figure fades into the darkness, bringing with him a few day’s worth of supplies, insistent on understanding the dark caverns of his house.

There is much to fear about this innate hunger to understand the incomprehensible, for it threatens to consume us whole.

This is the literal call of the abyss.

Soli Deo gloria.