The documentary film 'The Navidson Record', and the associated short pieces 'The Five and a Half Minute Hallway' and 'Exploration #4', record strange events in the house in rural Virginia to which Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his family have moved. Beginning as a pastoral record of Navidson family in their new home, 'The Navidson Record' swiftly darkens in tone when a short hallway appears between the master and the childrens' bedroom. Navidson discovers that the house is a quarter of an inch wider inside than it is outside, and the hallway expands, becoming the entrance to a vast maze of freezing, ashy-walled corridors, huge spaces, and a spiral staircase deeper than ever did any plummet sound.
The haunted house is a trope with a history almost as long as that of the fantasy and horror genres, including structures which contain topologically impossible elaborations, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to the infinite library in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and any number of houses possessed by malignant animation, most famously Poe's House of Usher, Shirley Jackson's Hill House, and the Amityville series of movies (like 'The Navidson Record', supposedly based upon real events). House of Leaves conflates both topological impossibility and haunting in its exploration of an oppressively watchful structure that's potentially of infinite size, patrolled by a monster that's never seen and which may, in the end, be no more than projections of the explorers' fevered imaginations.
Danielewski's evocation of this 'strange spiritual violation' is both artful and chillingly spooky, yet like the unseen and perhaps imaginary monster which haunts them, the vast spaces are ultimately unknowable, as is the truth of the story, of all stories. The editor of Zampanò's fragmentary text, Johnny Truant, is himself a fabulist who elaborates fantasies of his own past to seduce women, haunted by the fear of madness even before the story spun in House of Leaves ensnared him, an orphan raised by a brutal stepfather because his father died in a truck wreck and his mother was committed to an insane asylum when he was seven:
Of course she was lost in a blur. My poor father taking her from me, forced to grab hold of her, especially when they got her to the foyer and she started to scream, screaming to me . . . Like a bad dream, the details of those five and a half minutes just went and left me to my future.
The story, true or false, labyrinthine, intricately crafted, full of echoes and vertiginous trapdoors, possesses the reader. The lunatics are in the hall. The monster is inside your head.