In this, Truant's is a novel within a novel, just as The Navidson Record is the creepy potboiler buried within Zampano's critical summation, both grippingly told behind the sliding screens of authorial detachment that Danielewski interposes. And in his own copious footnotes, added to those already supplied by Zampano, Johnny Truant tells his own story, of a disturbed and disaffected childhood and early adulthood.īut if Zampano is revealed as one of modern fiction's most unreliable narrators, Truant is worse, admitting early in his own account to a talent for lying, especially if it will get him laid, while only hinting at the reality of the demons that infest him. Indeed, the critics quoted at such length by Zampano, as Johnny discovers, deny any knowledge of it.īut like the best stories, Zampano's book has a life of its own that insinuates its way into the life of the obsessive Johnny Truant as he attempts to edit Zampano's work. Even if he were not blind, as Johnny Truant tells us in a typical twist, he could not have seen it, as the film does not exist. Retrieving Zampano's trunk, Johnny becomes the unwilling heir to his life work, a vast critique of all the available criticism of The Navidson Record, a film documentary of a haunted house.Īll fine so far, except Zampano was blind and could not have seen the film. There he discovers the corpse of an old man known only as Zampano. A trainee tattooist who calls himself Johnny Truant, obscuring his real name to wrap himself in his delinquent reputation, is called to the LA apartment of his friend Lude - think Qualudes/lewd. His mission is to sow confusion, deliberately misleading the reader at almost every turn and undermining the credibility of his interlocutors.Īs plots go, it is not the easiest to precis. It is a novel in which something is always just lurking out of sight: a spectral beast the real identity and motivations of the alleged author (or authors) the key to understanding its labyrinthine and multi-layered stories, all of which dissolve under the scrutiny of closer observation.Ĭonfused? You should be, for that is Danielewski's intention in an experimental novel that is at once a genuinely scary chiller, a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read.

Danielewski's House of Leaves, his genre-defying debut novel.

The same hallucinatory experience is writ large in Mark Z. There is always another one walking beside you When I count, there are only you and I together Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Book of leaves danielewski