This is the kind of book that everyone says is scary but you’re a fan of horror and you’re like “pshh, this isn’t that scary” but then you put it down after reading 50+ pages straight and you have to brush your teeth in your quiet, dark apartment and suddenly you CANNOT leave the bathroom because SOMETHING is out there. You cannot go into the kitchen now because it looks larger in the dark. The sudden sound of your cat crunching her dry food is enough to make you emit a little scream.

It’s that kind of scary. It festers.

Just like unresolved trauma, amirite?

This is a case to read this book. Fear not its size, I think it’s worth the time, the energy, the neck aches, the reemergence of my childhood fear of the dark. 

Summing up this book is difficult without giving away some juicy tidbits that you should discover for yourself. If anything, this review is a call for you to just go and read it. Get outta here you crazy kid! Go read it and then come back!

First and foremost, what is the book about? 

Lol.

Um…let’s put it this way. There’s a man, Johnny Truant, a kind of slacker, sex, drugs, and rock and roll type (in a kind of cool but you’re also concerned for him kind of way) finds a manuscript in the apartment of his friend’s neighbor. This neighbor, Zampano, has just died, and while rifling through his apartment, Johnny finds this big stack of unorganized papers and decides to take them. The stack of papers is “The Navidson Record,” Zampano’s attempt to analyze the recordings taken by famed, award winning photojournalist Will Navidson of his newly acquired Virginia homestead. Navidson, along with his partner Karen and their two children, Daisy and Chad, have discovered their new house inexplicably changes in layout and size, revealing new, dark hallways that seem to stretch endlessly and a staircase that leads ??? Others- friends, family, scholars, explorers get involved in trying to decode the house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

So it’s a piece of critical analysis written by Zampano on Navidson’s films on his house, edited and annotated by Johnny Truant, and further edited by an enigmatic group, The Editors, who are ostensibly responsible for getting the books onto shelves and thus into our hands. 

And mama, that’s just the elevator pitch for this thing. 

To engage with this piece, you start off with that framework but then it begins to twist. Yes, Johnny is compiling Zampano’s work so it makes sense, but he is also adding his own annotations and often goes off on long ramblings in his own footnotes about “things that happen to him” (those quotations are iron clad). Johnny goes on for pages about the often violent and sexual escapades he gets himself into. So you’re getting Zampano’s meticulous, yet often pretentious footnotes, Johnny’s overblown personal story times /slash/ venting sessions, and the story of Navidson and the house itself. Sometimes all on one page, sometimes fighting for which footnote comes first to “help” you contextualize. This book will humble you in terms of how you remember engaging with academic texts, if you’re as removed from that world as I am at this point. Questions like “do I read the footnote in the middle of the sentence first, or do I finish the sentence first and then go to the footnote?” came up for me often. I was humbled, which gave way to tepid frustration, but then quickly to delight, because I knew I was being fucked with. Spoiler: it doesn’t matter. Maybe nothing does.

On TOP of that, on top of conflicting narratives and the degradation of the integrity of academic writing structures, you have how the words are arranged on the page. It starts with a pretty standard format, Johnny’s introduction in his Courier font leads way to the beginning of the manuscript in Zampano’s font, yadda yadda…but as Zampano explores Navidson and Co.’s descent into the house, the words mimic the spatial relationship the characters have to the house and/or what their mental state is as they interact with the space. It’s genius, and it lends itself to a point I will make later about how this book could never be turned into a film or miniseries. 

For someone with an overactive imagination (did you mean: me?), this book was downright delicious, because it took representing space in the literary medium to another level. By using only a couple of words smushed together on a large page, I felt the claustrophobia and at the same time the agoraphobia the book presents as a package deal. When the words trickled down, spiraled, constricted, inflated, I did too. I found I actually physically moved with the book as I spun it on its axis to be able to read the dynamic text, and was grateful that I was reading this book in the comfort of my own home, away from the judgmental gaze of my Starbucks neighbors.

So yes, multiple editors, narratives, footnotes, layouts, and colors. Yes, colors as they appear on the page are important here. Lest we forget the infamous use of house. Never explained, never given that information in a cute little Happy Meal box. Nothing, just the word house and all of the ways it’s presented is always in blue. Deal with it. Sections on the Minotaur are in red. Red, and revived by Johnny. 

But I’ve maybe gone too far. 

Perhaps to even explain in any detail how the book presents itself as a visual medium is taking it too far. You’re going to be thinking about the Minotaur long after you stop reading this and you won’t know why. Why was it in red? It was one of the parts of the novel that gave me, as the kids say, “the ick.” 

Listen, if you like a challenging read, you like Moby Dick but you’re tired of sailors, you tried Infinite Jest and were either too confused or wanted DFW to lean even more into the uncanny (if that was possible), then pick this up. 

You want to travel down the dark hallways of the Internet and stay up until 2am on sub/sub/sub Reddits about the theories about a comma on page 267 you’re all just noticing? Read this (but please make sure you take breaks from this, don’t wind up like someone we know)... 

If your name is Simon and you are the smartest little lad with an English and Philosophy double major from THE Yale University and you’re looking for a delightful spooky treat that also kind of digs at the futility of the academic writing form as a way to harness the unknown and the unquantifiable, which you love because your thesis advisor doesn’t get it, man but you get it, then damn son, this is for you. 

But also, hey, if you just want a crazy ride, just go for it. You don’t need a PhD to enjoy this book. The beauty of this book is that no one knows what the hell is ever going on. If someone reads this once, hell even twice, and tells you they know what it’s about, they’re full of shit and you should never ask their opinion on Ulysses. You will be confused. Read it to be confused. Luckily, you’re not actually in that house, you can end the journey at any time, end your confusion by putting the book away. But it is the journey not the destination with this one, and maybe that confusion is what will propel you to keep going. It’s a gift to be able to read something and be able to fully admit, “I don’t know, but I submit to it.” And god, we just love a book can be that and nothing (everything) more.