Readers, writers, and shark fans, rejoice! In a remarkable dual celebration of literary innovation, cult author Mark Z. Danielewski marks the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking novel, House of Leaves, while simultaneously announcing the forthcoming release of his highly anticipated untitled novel, set to debut in October 2025.
Originally circulated as an enigmatic manuscript among a diverse community of musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, and adrenaline junkies, House of Leaves has grown into a cultural phenomenon since the initial publication on March 7th, 2000. Over the past quarter-century, it has redefined the boundaries of horror and post-modern literature—transforming mundane spaces into realms of inexplicable terror and immersive storytelling. Today, the novel continues to captivate readers with its intricate design, featuring original colored words, vertical footnotes, and expanded appendices that deepen its labyrinthine narrative.
Critics have consistently lauded House of Leaves as a work that defies classification. “House of Leaves simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious,” noted Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times. Bret Easton Ellis proclaimed it “thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless.” Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, called it “this demonically brilliant book… impossible to ignore.”
Born in New York City and now residing in Los Angeles, Mark Z. Danielewski has consistently reimagined the art of storytelling. His body of work—which includes The Whalestoe Letters, Only Revolutions, The Fifty Year Sword, and The Familiar—has earned him a reputation as one of the most imaginative and influential voices in contemporary literature.
Get Your Copy of House of Leaves Today
Written by Mark Z. Danielewski
March 7, 2000: Knopf, Pantheon
ISBN-13: 978-03-7542-0528
$17-36 Paperback
Praise for House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Robert Kelly, The New York Times
“For all its modernist maneuvers, postmodernist airs and post-postmodernist critical parodies, House of Leaves is, when you get down to it, an adventure story: a man starts traveling inside a house that keeps getting larger from within, even as its outside dimensions remain the same … Throughout, the typeface tells us where we are, even if it’s not always clear which narrator or compiler we’re being lectured by, or what his state of mind might be … We are reading a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it. The hole is the core of the experience … The message they bring home is a chilling one: Fear lives in the earth, and we meet it as it rises, night after night, in place after place.”
Steven Moore, The Washington Post
“House of Leaves [is] the first major experimental novel of the new millennium. And it’s a monster…like David Foster Wallace channeling H.P. Lovecraft for a literary counterpart to The Blair Witch Project … Navidson’s documentary concerns a strange house in rural Virginia into which he moves with his family. All is well at first, but small spatial displacements soon occur … The accounts of the exploration of this dark abyss are hair-raising, and the physical impossibility of it all only deepens the metaphysical dread felt by the characters … Danielewski’s achievement lies in taking some staples of horror fiction – the haunted house, the mysterious manuscript that casts a spell on its hapless reader – and using his impressive erudition to recover the mythological and psychological origins of horror, and then enlisting the full array of avant-garde literary techniques to reinvigorate a genre long abandoned to hacks.”
Steven Poole, The Guardian
“There is something very wrong. The Navidson Record becomes a vérité horror film as Will and his friends try to explore the anomalous space, which rearranges itself periodically with a roar, and expands into terrifying volumes of darkness … Danielewski…weaves around his brutally efficient and genuinely chilling story a delightful and often very funny satire of academic criticism. In one way, and after the manner of Moby-Dick, the novel is its own Leviathan commentary … House of Leaves…is a superbly inventive creation. It is not mere genre fiction, because the author so gleefully ignores the conventions of horror: no finally unmasked monster, no ghosts, no malign extraterrestrials. There is only the house.”
Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“As big as the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, it takes the form of a book-length essay by a mysterious blind man named Zampano, writing about a 1993 documentary film called The Navidson Record. In the late ’80s, Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, moved his family into an old Virginia farmhouse that proves to be five sixteenths of an inch longer inside than it is outside … There are two and sometimes three narratives going on at once. Concurrently, the book’s text moves backward, upside down and diagonally, sometimes on the same page. There is even an index. Both daunting and brilliant, the novel is surprisingly fun to read, a sort of postmodern fun house where the reader becomes the author’s partner in putting the story together.”
Elizabeth Bukowski, The Wall Street Journal
“An intricate, erudite and deeply frightening book. The story – one of them, anyway – follows photographer Navidson and his family as their house begins to shift around them … Then there are the book’s ‘special effects,’ including pages-long footnotes, footnoted footnotes, pieces of text running diagonally across a page or in a small block in the middle. And the word ‘house’ appears in blue ink. If it sounds distracting or irritating, it’s not. Mr. Danielewski’s typographical mischief is all cleverly designed to intensify the creepy power of his engrossing novel.”
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