House of Leaves

Johnny Truant, a tattoo-shop apprentice living in Los Angeles, discovers the manuscript left behind by Zampanò, a blind, reclusive old man who has just died. The manuscript is an obsessively footnoted academic study of The Navidson Record — a documentary film that, as far as anyone can determine, does not exist.

The Navidson Record concerns Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist who moves into a house on Ash Tree Lane in rural Virginia with his partner, Karen Green, and their children. The family discovers their new home is fractionally larger on the inside than the outside — and then a doorway appears onto a vast, ever-shifting labyrinth of dark corridors that defies architecture and physics. Navidson's twin brother, Tom, and a team of explorers venture into the maze, with fatal and haunting consequences.

As Johnny assembles and annotates Zampanò's fragmentary, citation-choked pages — themselves shot through with references to critics and scholars who may or may not exist — he begins to come apart, his own grip on reality fraying in a way that echoes the fate of his institutionalized mother, Pelafina. Told through nested narrators, unreliable testimony, and radical typographic experimentation, House of Leaves is at once a haunted-house horror novel, a work of literary metafiction, and a labyrinth the reader must navigate as surely as its characters do.