Back Jacket Hack Job: House of Leaves

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

It’s my turn to do a back jacket hack job, in which I emerge from my shack to whack at a back jacket to give it flack until it cracks.
 
I finally finished reading House of Leaves recently. As a novel, it’s very … challenging. You can read my review on Goodreads to see what I thought. The description on the cover could go something like this:

 

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

WARNING: do not open this book unless it appeared mysteriously on your doorstep in the rain. This isn’t a horror novel, it’s an experience. The book should be absolutely filthy, waterlogged, almost impossible to read. If you bought this in a book store, you are not getting the full meta experience. This is Mark speaking. Also: fuck you.¹

 

What you are about to critically engage with is a story about a person discovering a transcription of an analysis of a movie about a house that’s a metaphor for a relationship. You lost already? For an explanatory prologue, please search your local pawn shop for the out-of-print references in Appendix D.^† I don’t want to see you read one page before you put in the work to understand the nuances of academic texts, have listened to the compact disc of my sister’s album, and are prepared to sit down and over-analyze every sentence of this 700-page manuscript.

 

As Natsume Sōseki remarked, after watching you read this back jacket from the impossible crawl space beneath your second-floor office: “Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.”²

 

There is one final message to understand before you open this book and begin. As I write this, I’m on a rollercoaster that appeared in my bathroom (long story), so this important message is upside-down and backwards. Stand on your head and look in a mirror or something:

 

ɟnɔʞ ʎon

 

—

 

¹ Psst, hey, it’s me, the guy who left the book on your doorstep. Don’t worry about that Mark guy. Nice lawn. It reminds me of this time I was in Shrewbury, woozy on shrooms and crushing hard on a stripper who was also an assassin who called herself Jiminy Cricket, and we lay in the grass, which was the shade of my mother’s jade necklace, so let me tell you about [sentence continues for nine pages]

 

^† Hey, it’s the editor. There is no Appendix D. Fuck you.

 

² Natsume Sōseki, Light and Darkness (1917, Putnam Publishing Group), as quoted by therandomvibez.com^♖

 

^♖ Is this a real book? I don’t know, but I guarantee you’ll put down House of Leaves to descend into a dark rabbit hole of Googling it, then find yourself in another room three hours later swiping through historical documents on your phone with no recollection of what led you there. It will take you five years to get through this book. Anyway, as I was saying about my mother and strippers, [twenty pages written in wingding font]

Hey it’s me, P.T. Phronk. I’m done. I’ll be back in a month, when I reveal the one tool that can double your writing output. It’s not what you think, so you’ll have to return to ATB in a month to find out what it is. How’s that for a cliffhanger? #marketing