House of Leaves: Addendum

Part 3 of 3 of a digital project on networked narrative. Part one, part two,  and explanation.

While Key Note’s presence online seems to have vanished, I must have piqued someone’s interest at the company, because I keep getting emails from them. I thought it might be spam at first, since none of them made any sense, filled with mostly the kind of word salad you’d expect from an automated response. But I’ve noticed that the handful of clearly formed words from each email seemed to spell out a few sentences:

go Into the treNches, take The stairwell down to where the partitions of pascal’s temple Have Elicited a golden yawn. Drum in the deep. Awake now, and Run from the Kye, no door will hold it.

Reading House of Leaves

A page from House of Leaves

This is my second time through the novel, that great sprawling beast of literature that almost defies definition, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Experimental would be the most base term to use to label it, while Post-Print fiction has recently been assigned, with always the Gothic and Satirical running through the mayhem of categorization. No matter how you view the novel, it is extremely effective. We can debate the story(s), which has its problems and holes, but the unified work achieves something greater than the sum of its parts, much like the titular house.