House of Leaves was a book i remembered hearing about a lot from Silent Hill fans back in the early 2000's. They described it as the ultimate note taking mystery. A puzzle you needed to deep dive into and spend years unravelling. I always meant to get around to it but only recently did and boy was this an oversold product.
The 'puzzle' is that its a book about a guy finding a dead mans unpublished novel about a movie that doesnt exist and the junkie burnouts notes as he tries to put it together. Somehow this drives him insane though i think the point was meant to be that like his mother he was suffering an illness already.
The big let down however wasnt the story which was a fine enough piece of meta fiction but the sheer childish nature of the 'hardest book you will ever read' i was sold on. Sometimes you have to read a page in a mirror. Or turn it upside down. Sometimes the amount of text on a page gets smaller and smaller as the formatting squeezes it into a smaller box of broken words to convey the feeling of the characters in a shrinking hallway. Yeah i get the symbolism here. That doesnt make it a puzzle though.
I finished it in about 4 days of casual reading and left it with a resounding 'okay, that was it' but i see hipsters gushing about it on youtube who seem like they desperately want to be 'part of the smart kids club' about this and i feel like its a case of it since many say they took over 8 years to read it.
I feel like it was probably a lot more amazing at the time it came out with all the experiments in media at the time but compared to a game like Silent Hill 2 or a multimedia project like This House has People in it the whole thing came off as outdated and bland.
Am i crazy or is this just some hipster badge of honour shit at this point?
