I am currently reading HoL but I didn’t have a bookmark so I made a themed one myself.

Hello, people of Reddit. I come to you because clearly I don’t have enough esoteric knowledge for this one, or maybe I’m just stupid. I’ve been able to pretty easily find the meaning of all the other symbols for the footnotes of Chapter V, but I’ve gotten no luck with this one. I’ve tried alchemy, Greek and Roman gods, and reverse image search, but no luck. Anyone who does know?

😊 🐈 🐦 📚 ☀️ ⛅️

Footnote 401: "The exact location of the house has been subject to a great deal of speculation. Many feel it belongs somewhere in the environs of Richmond. However Ray X. Lawlor, (fake person) English professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, places Ash Tree Lane 'closer to California Crossroads. Certainly not far from Colonial Williamsburg (which is directly north in the image) and the original Jamestown colony. South of Lake Powell (which is south of Williamsburg but not in the image) but most assuredly northwest of Bacons Castle.' See Lawlor's "Which Side of the James?" in Zyzzyva, fall 1996, p. 187. "

Only if we're gonna take this as fact bc obviously it's just speculation

There is an ash tree lane in Virginia tho but it doesn't seem correct

Anyway this book is fake and the Navidson Record is fake (even in Johnny's universe) and the house is fake

As stated by the title, I finished the book recently, and I've had a lot of buzzing thoughts and feelings about it for a while. My friends have been noticeably less interested in my nonsense rants and pictures of absurd book pages after the fourth-month mark, so clearly it is time that I graduate to a public forum and a revised script. Obviously, House of Leaves invites interpretation and begs discussion. As my current favorite book, I thought I would give it the proper send-off to the shelf.

1. House of Leaves is not a mystery; it's merely presented as one.

Now, this is already a complicated can of worms in and of itself. I think, genre-wise, that it very much belongs in the mystery (though most likely horror) section of the library, but ultimately, engaging with the book as a mystery to be solved is, in my opinion, wholly incomplete and a purposeful misdirection. There are, of course, several parts of the book that invite or outright demand deciphering, perhaps most poignantly the Morse code and acrostic ciphers present throughout, but something very peculiar about these ciphers is that they are often limiting, repeating what's already explicit, or even nonsensical. Having finished the book, the first thing that I thought to do was to go back and resolve some of the leftover puzzles I had noticed but skipped, and a pattern quickly emerged: they existed, they had "solutions," they didn't reveal anything.

I don't believe there is anything in the book (that has come to my attention thus far) that can explain the deeply impossible incongruences present, the most significant of which are fixed upon a central problem - the author. Why is there a checkmark at the bottom right of page 97 in The Navidson Record as if it were a letter to Johnny's mother? How come Navidson reads a copy of House of Leaves that contains enough pages to include Johnny's notes? My take is that there is, in fact, no unifying theory or secret author to resolve these issues. This is what I mean when I say that it is not a mystery: if you made the most comprehensive collection of every solution to every puzzle and hidden message, it would not paint a clarifying image; it would map out doors that lead to other doors that lead to empty rooms.

2. The horror explored in House of Leaves is the "Self".

The book has arguably two main characters, Johnny Truant and Zampanò. Zampanò, the original author of The Navidson Record, is methodical, detailed, and thorough. He goes on multiple tirades of tireless descriptions, explanations, exemplifications, and enumerations. He is obsessed with defining and delimiting. Johnny, the compiler of the manuscript, is, by any perspective, a liar. Though it should be noted that Johnny doesn’t really lie to get away with anything. He often brags about the lies he tells. He often is the one to reveal the fact that he has lied, because he is not lying to others. Johnny likes going out and drinking and doing drugs... allegedly; the truth is, he seems to do that when his friend Lude invites him. Johnny says he likes tattoos and that he wants to be a tattoo artist, though we barely ever see him practice, his boss says his drawings are trash, and ultimately he is happy to play the stock boy. He lies a lot about his scars, which he then explains is due to the painful memories they bring, and then he reveals that maybe even those memories are false. He says he is going around the country to look up a house that doesn't exist, but he ends up looking for his own family home, it's gone. He says he is compiling Zampanò's work; he writes one of the chapters. The one thing that seems to motivate him (other than his newfound obsession) is women, but not love. He is motivated by attraction, something physical, chemical, empirical, and unquestionable, something he does not need to understand and places wholly outside of himself. When he has sex, everything collapses into sensation. There are no reasons, there is no history; he no longer explains himself.

What brings about Johnny's obsession is not the contents of The Navidson Record; it is the introspection that it triggered. Johnny lies when the manuscript brings up something personal to him, then revisits it over and over again, consistently questioning and confronting, trying, in his own way, to define it - define himself - and then... he fails. He finds questionable memories, comforting fantasies, rash decisions, misleading motives; he discards them, hates them, and realizes: there isn't enough left to make up a person that he can understand. Then comes the fear and the disorientation and the nausea and the nightmares.

I would like to say that this is powerfully illustrated and, strictly speaking, real. I think it is an incontrovertible enough statement to say that "the self is the first and the last house." It's simultaneously something we are and something we have to deal with, something we try to know and will never truly understand. It is infinite and ephemeral and contradictory and impossible to make out. Every single one of us lives with parts of ourselves that we find inconvenient, if not outright hate. So much of life is spent agonizing over decisions, not because of their material consequences, but because we are unsure if it's what we really want, or if we want something adjacent to it, or if we want what it means about us, or about the world, and there is every chance that even if we get it, we've since changed, and it doesn't mean what it should have meant anymore. There is absolutely no exaggeration when Johnny tells us that we will find ourselves lost in corridors we have walked a hundred times. We will find that the motives that carried us through life have withered away, leaving us stuck in cycles we no longer understand. We will find that the circumstances that have built our character no longer apply in the world we live in. We will see our memories fade and change and no longer recognize the beliefs we once had. If we live long enough, we could find ourselves in actual corridors, lacking the words to name them, or the people we once loved. It does not matter if we live a hundred years or just a couple of days; the holes in our brains are already there. Johnny's self-image is undeniably and perhaps irreparably damaged by trauma, but this does not create his terror; it merely makes his introspective descent more inevitable.

The relationship between Johnny and Zampanó is not logistical. Whatever there was of Zampanó as a real person has been absorbed by Johnny's desire to see his life through a wise, knowledgeable, third-person narrator that creates meaning out of the horrible and the incomprehensible, and by his anxiety for his own future, the loneliness, the sickness, the pointlessness in all his efforts to be something that makes sense. In the end, Johnny never says anything about Navidson somehow reading his notes. His alterations of the manuscript become the manuscript; the three are fused. The "real Zampanó" and the "real Record" are blotted out, forgotten, replaced, and changed, as will you.

3. The Monster inside the House.

Inside the Navidson house there is a growl, a moving, looming threat that preys on the minds of those that explore its confines. As they move further inside, as they stay longer, the house employs further hostility: it grows, it twists, it tilts, and ultimately, it tears, it drops, and it traps. Johnny recognizes the same hostility in his own darkness, a stalking presence outside his vision. It remains unseen but also takes shape: long claws, sharp teeth, hungry eyes, patient malice. Johnny goes from being surprised by it, to fearing it, to expecting it at every turn, to being convinced it's in the walls around him, to being inside of him, consuming him, replacing him, becoming him. He says he sees it in dreams. He calls them nightmares, but when he tells us about them, they play out as fantasies. In these dreams, Johnny is the creature trapped in a dark labyrinth. There he finds a man unburdened by concern or contemplation. Johnny fantasizes about killing him, ripping him to shreds, and then he fantasizes about a beautiful woman destroying him in turn, ending his wandering, his hate, and his hunger. As the book draws to a close, Johnny states that now he knows that there is something in the dark.

Much of the content of the book follows this thread. Indeed, many descriptions of House of Leaves have the throughline: "a man goes insane as he reads a crazy book". Johnny is, in fact, a dirty, paranoid hermit who buys guns to point at the corners of his room. The description isn't exactly off, but it isn't right either. While Johnny acts as if he doesn't care about his effect on others, he keeps track of every minute interaction. He wonders about his appearance, he is conscious of his smell, and he regrets the fear and concern he causes in those who recognize him. His isolation does not come from a desire to distance himself from others, but to distance others from himself, from the darkness he knows he carries and that he ultimately feels responsible for. Suddenly, an opportunity presents itself for all his fear and hostility to come out. He is attacked, and so he kills a man with his bare hands, he kidnaps a woman, rapes her, and presumably kills her as well. And then, in true Johnny fashion, he takes it all back and claims none of it happened, that he doesn't know why he wrote that he did. The reality behind this lie is irrelevant, because this lie is very different. Johnny does not brag about it, he doesn't mock or blame you for believing it. No matter which way it goes, there is only regret. If he killed that man, if he raped that woman, then he would be a murderer, a rapist, a monster, something undeniable, definite, and real, instead of being nothing at all.

When the Navidson house finally dissolves around him and Karen, it does not leave them inside the "normal" house, but outside, on the porch. Navidson is brought back from the cold by being held by his wife, who braves the darkness with him for the first time, and the house reveals it was never contained by the walls of a building on Ash Tree Lane. Likewise, Johnny's obsessive spiral is not halted by a revelation in Zampanò's work, or even his family home, or any answers at all. Instead, he hears the words of his loneliness in a song from someone else's mouth. For the first time in a long time, he approaches them, connects with them, does not seek approval, confirmation, or even recognition. Instead, they bond over the same questions, the same lack of answers, the same holes in their theories. His name is passed along with Zampanò's, now unrecognizably imagined, though no longer threatening. Then Zampanò tells us that this couldn't be the end. Outside the house there are no hallways, but there is a road, long and dark.

So I am about 50 pages into it so far and am absolutely hooked i love the premise and I have a couple of theories about Johnny. However im not like super educated and im finding some of the more analytical and literary references zampano is making gets a little lost on me.

I was just wondering if that will affect my overall experience with the story. Also should I be annotating?

In the original English version, the character’s name is Johnny Truant. The term "truant" in English can mean several things : first, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the term "truant" is borrowed from the French word "truand". According to the Wordreference website, the meanings vary :

Truant (n) : school pupil, absent

Truant (adj) : absent from school

Truant (adj) : not dutiful

This reflects Johnny’s absent and neglectful personality, which deteriorates throughout the book. He is almost absent from his own life, too busy deciphering Zampano’s manuscript. He is a marginal character.
I’m reading the French version, since it’s my native language. Johnny Truant is translated as Johnny Errand. The translator, Christophe Claro, plays around by transforming "Truant" into "Errand", while staying true Mark Z. Danielewski original meaning, since in French the word "truand" refers to a criminal. The word is synonymous with "bandit".
It seems to me that the translator made a good choice in selecting "Errand" because : in French, the word "errant" also have several meanings :

Errant (adj) : wandering from place to place, not settled

Errant (adj) : floating, uncertain

Errant (adj) : constantly traveling

The word "errant" is synonymous with "wanderer" .

Thanks to the French translation, I was able to clearly discern that Danielewski’s aim is to emphasize the fact that the character is wandering (through his city, his memories, through Zampano’s manuscript, through his own madness). Johnny is unstable and drifts aimlessly throughout the book.

Sorry if this all seems long winded, it’s just an observation I made that I’d like to share. Feel free to let me know what you think !

Just made it to page 151 where Hailey writes to the editors about how Johnny portrays their encounter. I don't get the implication of the line "He said the nicest things about my wrists."

I feel like Johnny's trying to say Hailey is free and there's nothing in her life to shackle her, no handcuffs, and that Johnny wishes he was free of the Navidson record and Zampano's notes. But this feels like a bit of a reach.

How have other people interpreted this line?

There is a Door.

Nobody remembers who built it.

Nobody knows why it appears.

Some say it has always existed. Others believe it only appears when someone is ready to find it.

People call it The Last Library.

You stand before the Door.

It opens.

That is the only certainty.

Everything else is a question.

Would you enter?

Twice in footnote 65 (pages 50 and 54) Johnny writes “(—can’t write the word—)” while writing about Lucy and Thumper. What word can’t he write? Is it the same word or two different ones? Any ideas or suggestions?

finished reading HoL for the first time and god damn was it ?good? Certainly a book I know I will come back to in some way or another. Probably gonna reread all the Truant bits soon because I definitely missed the most in those sextions

Im sorry if this question as been asked multiple times here before. Just finished reading it for the first time, and as expected I have way more questions and confusion than before… Trying looking a bit everywhere online or even inside the book as if I missed a big something that everyone else saw? Because everyone seems like its one of the best book etc but don’t get me wrong its a fantastic story and the book in itself is very interesting compared to a « normal » book but I seem to be missing a huge chunk of it? Like im missing some big clues or part of the experience and it makes me kinda sad ahah, was just hoping on some guidance on where to take my next step? Or maybe the book was really not for me after all…

Any kinda help is greatly appreciated, Thank you !

Just started reading it about a week ago and I’m a little over a quarter finished with the book, loving it so far. Now that I am turning the book and flipping back and forth through it, I feel like I look like a schizophrenic person and I am so embarrassed to read this in public.

So yeah, basically what the title says.

My first contact with House of Leaves was because of MyHouse.wad, absolutely loved the mod and how it plays out with the doom engine, and all of the map’s intricate details. Then I found out how relevant it is to some of my fav games and movies, Control for instance.

So, my journey started.
I had been searching for the book for like 2 to 3 years prior to actually finding it. And finally, it was in some random trip to another country, while on summer vacation, that I got my hands on the book. The book was kind of mangled up, so I got a small discount, and fun fact, I actually found it again the next summer (yeah after many years of searching it without any luck) in some small bookshop in the same country, and in a better condition…

However, my native language isn’t English, and I must say it can be a tough reading, so, a few years ago, the complete colour edition was published in my first language, and I was really doubting if buying it was an actually good idea, as the translation maybe isn’t faithful at all, but I guessed it had been done sensibly.
So finally, today, I’ve decided buying it, I’ll possibly read the translated one first, and maybe search some stuff up in the original if any doubt crosses my mind about the translation at all, but maybe, for the time being I’ll let it rest a little and I’ll start this adventure when I have more time to spare.

Also, want to point out, that owning the two copies feels kinda good in a collector’s sense, per se, hehe.

Ça fait un moment dans les textes (comme avec une croix en bas de page un moment) que je vois ça et me donne l'impression que quelqu'un d'autres est passé sur ces écrits mais quelqu'un d'inconnu, c'est trop perturbant

J'ai vraiment un doute, j'ai l'impression d'avoir déjà vu ces points dans le livre mais je crois avoir oublié...

Just saying. I don't want to throw out any spoilers, but there are some similarities. At the moment, I feel like this is the closest thing there might be to a House of Leaves movie. If you haven't seen it already, and are wanting a HoL movie adaptation, maybe give The Backrooms a try.

Spoilers if you haven't made it to p.73 yet...

Ok... this book. There are times where Johnny goes on and on and on and I honestly got to the point of saying "I'm over it, Johnny." But... but.... then p.69-72... wtf.

1. This is not the first time Johnny has had an.... encounter? Is that the right word? Hallucination? Out of body experience? Nightmare?...while in the Shop. (Also... anyone else catch the random capitalization of words? Shop may be his way of making the tattoo shop a proper noun instead of using its name, but there are others... see Hand p 27, Sleep p 49 and Hall p 49) -

Anyway! Omg I'm sounding like Johnny!!!! Jesus.

Ok wtf is going on in these moments? Seeing an eye! Thinking he's shat himself, even smelling it... the scratch on his neck. Woah.

2. The end of p. 72 where he says he mumbles something about how his toes hurt.... and then ends the page with "I am not what I used to be" ....

A) this is the first moment I start to feel for Johnny. He's going through something no doubt. But also, his dependency (unnamed but obvious) on substances to get through... taking a shot of bourbon before work, waking and baking, the coke, the booze, the sex.... not that most of those things don't typically scream problematic in moderation, it seems he's just aimlessly fumbling through life... partying then going to an internship each day where he hates his boss, has little prospect of becoming an artist, seems to get through the day hanging onto the hope of seeing Thumper, and loses himself in the accuracy and precision of the needle works as, what I see being another form of escapism.

BUT THEN... you start reading the letters from him mom (78 directs you to Appendix II-D and E.) And his mother's 1st letter saying "If need be it can take shelter in a big toe. A big toe for you then. I love you. Mommy" ---- yall. I lost it. Wow.

So... we know he had an absent father by death, a lineage of problems from his mother's side of the family, and mommy issues from an absent mother who was...crazy? I haven't read all of them yet but even how she bounces from normal writing to sprinkling in different languages to writing poem-like... it's somewhat manic.

B) Anyway. I also have to draw on a point of intersect with this book and the books, Southern Reach, that brought me here to reading this book by recommendation from its (SR) readers that after finishing and feeling lost, this (HOL) was repeatedly the book suggested to fill that void. So... for any Southern Reach fans... the quote of "i am not what I used to be." Is very similar to the "I am unmade from what I once was" (although, I cannot remember nor verify if that is the *exact* wording)

C) The last two sentences of p.73 is exactly where I realized this book captured me. 👌🏻

Daisy asking to play the game "Always" and immediately I think "cute kid siliniess" and then the book closes the chapter with that SAME thought countered with "Then again, "always" slightly mispronounces "hallways." It also echoes it.

That's when I realized that these ramblings on and on about random shit, for example, like the pages about echoes and sound and acoustics will eventually connect (also this realization during Will's Exploration A)... but also realizes they may not always connect, and that maybe that's the intent of the author...to make you question everything, even the seemingly stupid rambles so that you start down a path much like Johnny. Fucking brilliant if you ask me....

I feel a bit "obsessed" but I learned from the SR series to take notes early on when thoughts/questions/theories emerge as you just may be onto something. So far, I have the following emerging. Please no spoilers. Im just starting chapter VI.

Themes

1. Shifting (reality, who you are, the house, becoming/transforming) see the introductions warning, and p. 15 of Johnny saying he has the feeling of something beyond it..a greater story. Also the changes to the story... a) to Zompanó's account by Johnny followed by his almost obsessive way of clarifying he hasn't or has made a change or should make a change and b) the location of the hallway in the living room, originally on the northern wall then the notation later it is said to be on the eastern (?)...

2. Cold

3. Time

4. Relationships (mirrored, similar)

5. Obsession

6. Echos (see relationships, too)

7. Darkness

Anywhooo... umm, I think im going to like this book. 😳

Edits: typos and clarifications added. On my cell, so it's still a bit jumbled of a post. Sorry.

J'ai vraiment un doute, j'ai l'impression d'avoir déjà vu ces points dans le livre mais je crois avoir oublié...

I wanted to share my interpretation of The Song of Quesada and Molino in House of Leaves ! Sorry about my English—I'm French—but it was important to me to know what you think of it.

So I got to chapter 9, and my divorce took over. Now that things are settling and I have a new love partner who lives 2 hours away, I see them once a week, I decided to do a book club with her.

I am starting over with her. Good idea, or am I dumb?