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pandora_parrotI'm going to spoil a bit of Alan Wake 2, and a LOT, if not most, of House of Leaves in this post. So please make sure to turn away if you're interestred in House of Leaves, and consider doing so if you're looking to avoid spoilers for Alan Wake 2. That said, let's go in.
Okay, so anyone that has known me for any reasonable period of time can tell that I'm really really into House of Leaves. This is a book by Mark Z. Danielewski that is extremely difficult to describe. If you're not familiar with it, let me quickly try to describe it below
House of Leaves is best considered an interactive horror experience and less of a traditional novel. While a coherent, novel like horror story does exist inside the book, that story is wrapped in layers and layers of other kinds of material. As a result, it is difficult to describe the book in a singular, coherent way, as each layer introduces elements that are not part of the other elements.
The story at the heart of this book is the "Navidson Record," a neat little horror story about a typical American family moving into their new home, but spooky things are happening. Specifically, they discover doors that lead to impossible hallways and impossible dimensions. An early example is a hallway connecting two bedrooms that adds extra impossible space in between the two bedrooms. They measure the distance from wall to wall through the hallway and it is larger than the outer dimensions of the house.
Later on, the family goes on expeditions into some of these impossible hallways and find they lead to strange vast caverns that largely resemble the modern idea of the backrooms if they were unlit. Just impossible architecture and spaces that seemingly go on forever.
Okay, so that's the first layer, the core narrative, and the closest thing we find inside the story to a typical horror novel. But what House of Leaves does is wrap this in layers of commentary and footnotes and immersive typesetting, as well as ARG-like puzzles. We never actually get to really *read* the Navidson record directly. Parts of it, yes, but it is described to us within the context of another author, Zampano, writing a critique of a film version of that story. Then Zampano's film critique is then filtered through yet another narrator, this time a shitty tattoo artist named Johnny Truant. Both offer commenter on the views of those closer to the core story as the book goes on, each having their own narrative and experience.
More than anything else I can use to describe House of Leaves, I would describe it as deeply attempting to draw its reader into its story in a way that few others stories have. For those people that get into the story and try to start figuring out its secrets, going down the ARG-like rabbit hole that the story has to offer... those readers will eventually find themselves, or their thoughts, represented as actual characters within the novel.
Let me explain what I mean. One of the core elements of the book is the fact taht Zampano is doing deeply intellectual literary analysis and criticism of the Navidson Record. But at the same time, the book deeply criticizes this activity. As you go deeper and find more analysis, you discover, more and more, that the literary analysis present in the book is a satire of such things. The book is actually, in some ways, making fun of or critizing the iea of deeply analyzing a piece of art. Of note, it does this criticism EVEN AS it invites you to perform that same criticism AND as it spends a good portion of its text doing exactly that kind of literary criticism! It is deeply and intentionally hypocritical. If you start to write essays on it, like I'm doing here, you can't help but have parts of that narrative call out to you and remind you that the book itself is commenting on what you're doing RIGHT NOW. As one line suggests, "You are still inside the house."
Another thing, a little more close to what I want to talk about in this discussion, is the ARG-like elements. By that I mean that there are various puzzles in the story. Take the first letter of each word of a passage, and you'll find a secret message. Paragraph lengths in one section spell out words in morse code. When coupled with the fact that there are multiple narrators to the story, all of which are revealed to be unreliable, you find yourself constantly lookign at every little dot or typo or error in the printing and wondering if it has extra meaning. Perhaps you'll even start to take notes in the ample margins around the book. On the outside cover of the book, a sticker notes that there is a companion music album written by the artist Poe. Listening to it, you find references to Johnny, readings from Mark Danielewski, and track titles that reference moments ahd key items in the story.
As you immerse yourself so deeply, taking notes in the margins, listening to the music, trying to solve the puzzles before you... You abruptly find yourself in the novel, as Johnny Truant encounters you in the story. Not you exactly, of course, but a group of people that have somehow received an advanced copy of the novel, are listening to its companion album, and themselves are writing in the margins, trying to solve puzzles. They even tell you the solutions to a few puzzles, and when you check the book for those solutions, yep... They're right. The book once again calls you out for your intrigue and interest. It once again absorbs you into its narrative. But bizarrely, the book itself is now part of the book's own narrative.
If this isn't enough ouroboros for you, whatever happens to the characters in the central horror story starts happening to you the reader as well. When they go into a maze, the text itself becomes a maze of footnotes and references. It literally took me 30 minutes to find the actual start of the Labyrinth chapter. Another section describes the characters seeing things in flashes of light without sound, and when this happens, your book shows only a handful of words on each page. Mere glimpses into what happens. Another moment has the characters breaking a hole in a wall, only for you to discover a footnote that extends *through* multiple pages in the book. The climax of the Navidson Record has a character reading House of Leaves to get to the end of the story.
The book is trying, constantly, to place you inside it. To give you as close an experience to what the characters are experiencing as it can, and not just through imagination, but through actual action and activity.
As a result of all this, many people have found the book to be either deeply intriguing or utterly unpleasant and frustrating. And while I love what Mark Z. Danielewski has created here, the characters and narrative he has made are definitely flawed in a literary sense. To be honest, I haven't been able to really read any of his other novels despite this novel being so beloved by me.
Just last night, I finished playing Alan Wake 2 with the household and found myself realizing the depths of which Remedy has been actively and specifically mining House of Leaves for content. Before I explain that, let me go into a little extra detail here about the artist Poe.
So I mentioned that Poe made a companion album to the book House of Leaves, yeah? Well, it so happens that due to studio fuckery, that album was the last one she ever published under that name. The publisher that owned the rights to her music was sold to a bigger conglomerate that promptly shut it all down. Between 2000 and 2023, only a scant few songs were produced and published under the name Poe.
What's particularly notable about this is that Poe's actual name is Anne Danielewski, sister to Mark Danielewski, who was the author of House of Leaves. Not only did she create songs based on the same story, but she actually helped edit her brother's book and ultimately connected him with the publisher who would publish his novel. She is in many ways a co-creatyor of, and character within, Mark's novel.
So let's get to Remedy and what's so fucking cool about their involvement. It's patently obvious that House of Leaves was a huge inspiration to Sam Lake and the other creators at Remedy. Their love of meta concepts like those found in House of Leaves were present going back all the way to their early work on Max Payne. When they released control, they used the idea of a constantly shifting house as a clear inspiration for "The Oldest House" that features prominently in the game's narrative.
Alan Wake 2 takes the connections even further with multiple unreliable narrators, multiple layers of reality, and deep questions about what, if anything, is actually real. Alan Wake 2 features the titular character writing stories that are coming true around him. You actually play as a few of his characters, and they find themselves questioning, constantly, what parts of themselves are real and what parts of themselves are just there because Alan is writing about them. There's even literary criticism in the story in the form of interludes with "Mr. Door" a talk show host doing meta analysis of the story. Some big meta moments are when various characters comment on Alan Wake's stories, but those stories are themselves happening around you, as they are the narrative of the very video games you're playing. Sam Lake, the creative director of Remedy, even appears as "himself" at one point, though as an actor playing one of Alan Wake's characters in the movie adaptation of one of his novels. Mr. Door comments that this is all "very meta."
At the end of each section of the game are musical interludes, which heavily feature Poe. But more than just featuring Poe, they actually have a completely original new song by Poe created just for this game featuring SUBSTANTIALLY for a large portion of the game. It seems to be one of the few pieces of music that Poe has published in the past 2 decades under the name Poe. It's so wonderful and gratifying to see this incredible artist given a chance to create again under that name.
But also... Given that Poe and her music is present within the narrative of House of Leaves... does that mean that House of Leaves is now part of the remedyverse? Maybe they'll never explicitly suggest it, but it wouldn't *at all* take any stretching of the imagination to suggest that it was.
Okay, so anyone that has known me for any reasonable period of time can tell that I'm really really into House of Leaves. This is a book by Mark Z. Danielewski that is extremely difficult to describe. If you're not familiar with it, let me quickly try to describe it below
House of Leaves is best considered an interactive horror experience and less of a traditional novel. While a coherent, novel like horror story does exist inside the book, that story is wrapped in layers and layers of other kinds of material. As a result, it is difficult to describe the book in a singular, coherent way, as each layer introduces elements that are not part of the other elements.
The story at the heart of this book is the "Navidson Record," a neat little horror story about a typical American family moving into their new home, but spooky things are happening. Specifically, they discover doors that lead to impossible hallways and impossible dimensions. An early example is a hallway connecting two bedrooms that adds extra impossible space in between the two bedrooms. They measure the distance from wall to wall through the hallway and it is larger than the outer dimensions of the house.
Later on, the family goes on expeditions into some of these impossible hallways and find they lead to strange vast caverns that largely resemble the modern idea of the backrooms if they were unlit. Just impossible architecture and spaces that seemingly go on forever.
Okay, so that's the first layer, the core narrative, and the closest thing we find inside the story to a typical horror novel. But what House of Leaves does is wrap this in layers of commentary and footnotes and immersive typesetting, as well as ARG-like puzzles. We never actually get to really *read* the Navidson record directly. Parts of it, yes, but it is described to us within the context of another author, Zampano, writing a critique of a film version of that story. Then Zampano's film critique is then filtered through yet another narrator, this time a shitty tattoo artist named Johnny Truant. Both offer commenter on the views of those closer to the core story as the book goes on, each having their own narrative and experience.
More than anything else I can use to describe House of Leaves, I would describe it as deeply attempting to draw its reader into its story in a way that few others stories have. For those people that get into the story and try to start figuring out its secrets, going down the ARG-like rabbit hole that the story has to offer... those readers will eventually find themselves, or their thoughts, represented as actual characters within the novel.
Let me explain what I mean. One of the core elements of the book is the fact taht Zampano is doing deeply intellectual literary analysis and criticism of the Navidson Record. But at the same time, the book deeply criticizes this activity. As you go deeper and find more analysis, you discover, more and more, that the literary analysis present in the book is a satire of such things. The book is actually, in some ways, making fun of or critizing the iea of deeply analyzing a piece of art. Of note, it does this criticism EVEN AS it invites you to perform that same criticism AND as it spends a good portion of its text doing exactly that kind of literary criticism! It is deeply and intentionally hypocritical. If you start to write essays on it, like I'm doing here, you can't help but have parts of that narrative call out to you and remind you that the book itself is commenting on what you're doing RIGHT NOW. As one line suggests, "You are still inside the house."
Another thing, a little more close to what I want to talk about in this discussion, is the ARG-like elements. By that I mean that there are various puzzles in the story. Take the first letter of each word of a passage, and you'll find a secret message. Paragraph lengths in one section spell out words in morse code. When coupled with the fact that there are multiple narrators to the story, all of which are revealed to be unreliable, you find yourself constantly lookign at every little dot or typo or error in the printing and wondering if it has extra meaning. Perhaps you'll even start to take notes in the ample margins around the book. On the outside cover of the book, a sticker notes that there is a companion music album written by the artist Poe. Listening to it, you find references to Johnny, readings from Mark Danielewski, and track titles that reference moments ahd key items in the story.
As you immerse yourself so deeply, taking notes in the margins, listening to the music, trying to solve the puzzles before you... You abruptly find yourself in the novel, as Johnny Truant encounters you in the story. Not you exactly, of course, but a group of people that have somehow received an advanced copy of the novel, are listening to its companion album, and themselves are writing in the margins, trying to solve puzzles. They even tell you the solutions to a few puzzles, and when you check the book for those solutions, yep... They're right. The book once again calls you out for your intrigue and interest. It once again absorbs you into its narrative. But bizarrely, the book itself is now part of the book's own narrative.
If this isn't enough ouroboros for you, whatever happens to the characters in the central horror story starts happening to you the reader as well. When they go into a maze, the text itself becomes a maze of footnotes and references. It literally took me 30 minutes to find the actual start of the Labyrinth chapter. Another section describes the characters seeing things in flashes of light without sound, and when this happens, your book shows only a handful of words on each page. Mere glimpses into what happens. Another moment has the characters breaking a hole in a wall, only for you to discover a footnote that extends *through* multiple pages in the book. The climax of the Navidson Record has a character reading House of Leaves to get to the end of the story.
The book is trying, constantly, to place you inside it. To give you as close an experience to what the characters are experiencing as it can, and not just through imagination, but through actual action and activity.
As a result of all this, many people have found the book to be either deeply intriguing or utterly unpleasant and frustrating. And while I love what Mark Z. Danielewski has created here, the characters and narrative he has made are definitely flawed in a literary sense. To be honest, I haven't been able to really read any of his other novels despite this novel being so beloved by me.
Just last night, I finished playing Alan Wake 2 with the household and found myself realizing the depths of which Remedy has been actively and specifically mining House of Leaves for content. Before I explain that, let me go into a little extra detail here about the artist Poe.
So I mentioned that Poe made a companion album to the book House of Leaves, yeah? Well, it so happens that due to studio fuckery, that album was the last one she ever published under that name. The publisher that owned the rights to her music was sold to a bigger conglomerate that promptly shut it all down. Between 2000 and 2023, only a scant few songs were produced and published under the name Poe.
What's particularly notable about this is that Poe's actual name is Anne Danielewski, sister to Mark Danielewski, who was the author of House of Leaves. Not only did she create songs based on the same story, but she actually helped edit her brother's book and ultimately connected him with the publisher who would publish his novel. She is in many ways a co-creatyor of, and character within, Mark's novel.
So let's get to Remedy and what's so fucking cool about their involvement. It's patently obvious that House of Leaves was a huge inspiration to Sam Lake and the other creators at Remedy. Their love of meta concepts like those found in House of Leaves were present going back all the way to their early work on Max Payne. When they released control, they used the idea of a constantly shifting house as a clear inspiration for "The Oldest House" that features prominently in the game's narrative.
Alan Wake 2 takes the connections even further with multiple unreliable narrators, multiple layers of reality, and deep questions about what, if anything, is actually real. Alan Wake 2 features the titular character writing stories that are coming true around him. You actually play as a few of his characters, and they find themselves questioning, constantly, what parts of themselves are real and what parts of themselves are just there because Alan is writing about them. There's even literary criticism in the story in the form of interludes with "Mr. Door" a talk show host doing meta analysis of the story. Some big meta moments are when various characters comment on Alan Wake's stories, but those stories are themselves happening around you, as they are the narrative of the very video games you're playing. Sam Lake, the creative director of Remedy, even appears as "himself" at one point, though as an actor playing one of Alan Wake's characters in the movie adaptation of one of his novels. Mr. Door comments that this is all "very meta."
At the end of each section of the game are musical interludes, which heavily feature Poe. But more than just featuring Poe, they actually have a completely original new song by Poe created just for this game featuring SUBSTANTIALLY for a large portion of the game. It seems to be one of the few pieces of music that Poe has published in the past 2 decades under the name Poe. It's so wonderful and gratifying to see this incredible artist given a chance to create again under that name.
But also... Given that Poe and her music is present within the narrative of House of Leaves... does that mean that House of Leaves is now part of the remedyverse? Maybe they'll never explicitly suggest it, but it wouldn't *at all* take any stretching of the imagination to suggest that it was.
