Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth — musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies — the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story — of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading this one. Always one to find a treasure in the endless list of Amazon recommendations, this book found me. I was hooked from the beginning: “And then the nightmares will begin.” To say that I had nightmares wouldn’t do this gem justice. There are winding staircases that never seem to end, a fortress within a house all found by a mysterious hallway, a plague of curiosity on a man that moved his family to Virginia for a fresh start, and that prose—that beautiful prose that flows from sentence to sentence all the while there is another story, the first, or maybe the second, floating around through rambling footnotes at the bottom. This is a symphony of words. A perfection of the craft. An enviable production. And it hasn’t received anywhere near the praise that it deserves.
Source: Examiner Los AngelesThis is the book I most want to read again for the first time.
Source: Shelf Awareness
Reading this book is an experience everyone should have. Meta-fiction for a new generation.

