oh good god.
1x cure for insomnia:
give up caffeine (sorry, there's no easy shortcut)
approach bookshelf (with caution)
Choose biggest, most obscure looking book thereon.
Take it to bed with you.
Read it until you fall forward into the spine like some sort of crude metaphor.
So I picked up 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski:
720-ish pages of courier and times type. It had appendices. It had an index and a bibliography. It looked impenetrable, obscure and boring. Thought I'd be snoozing in minutes.
Wrong.
Turned out to be a fictional editorial of a fictional assembly of a found (fictional) critical work on a fictional movie about a fictional family living in a house that turns out to measure 3/4 of an inch longer on its inside wall than on its outside wall.
Phew.
Basically, the Navidsons move into a seriously creepy house that grows random doors that lead into extensive, freezing cold, ashen-walled corridors. The patriarch of the family is an ex-war journalist whose first impulse is to go in and explore. His wife Karen, ex-model, full time neurotic tells him that if he goes inside she'll take their two kids and leave him. So he calls up some old friends and sends them down instead, armed with video cameras and survival gear. It all kind of escalates from there, with an old blind man's obsessive ramblings on the film being found by a drugged up, hyper-intelligent LA waster who becomes obsessed with the whole issue.
It scared the crap out of me! Partly the notion of a roaring, invisible Something living between the walls we set so much store by. Partly the eerie layout of the book which breaks down into total impenetrability now and again only to fragment into sequences of pages containing only a single sentence. It's majestic and horrible and I loved every minute of it. It is saved from becoming either limited by the haunted-house genre or pigeonholed as a literary Blair Witch project by the classical themes and very real core of fascinating academia that pervades the narrative.
It's opened up a whole series of dark corridors inside me that I never suspected were there.
Didn't exactly help me sleep though.
Go get em tiger.
Recent comments