If You Liked Backrooms, You’d Love House of Leaves

Slight spoilers follow for Backrooms ahead. 

In Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, a furniture-store employee discovers an inexplicable space in the storage area, sets out to explore it, and ruins many people’s lives in his quest to understand where it goes, or why it exists at all. To say much more about Backrooms would be spoiler territory, so if you want that, here you go. But if you’re interested purely in the concept of “weird liminal location that makes no sense and that might drive me insane if I think about it too much?,” then your next read needs to be House of Leaves.

One of the great tomes of modern horror, Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 debut is thought to have helped inspire the online backrooms concept, which took on its own life online in part through Parsons’s YouTube videos. On the internet and in Parsons’s work, the backrooms are primarily business, retail, or other spaces meant for a specific use that, when abandoned, evoke a kind of uncertainty and fear. If a space isn’t being used for its intended purpose, then what else can manifest there? Part of the reason the backrooms unnerve us so much is because spaces like that — hallways, stairwells, basements, offices, hotel or motel rooms — are usually meant to serve us, and when emptied of people, they seem to take on an identity of their own, apart from us.

House of Leaves grounded that fear of the unknown in the domestic space, which has always been where horror thrives. When the place where you’re supposed to be safest can no longer be trusted, what else in your life can’t be? Your relationships? Your family? Your purpose in life? Your own eyes, your own memory, your own mind? The novel’s plot is presented via a series of framing devices. It begins with a note from the mysterious “Editors” about the veracity of the text and then introduces Johnny Truant, who writes in a first-person journal entry about how he took it upon himself to read through, research, and verify a project written by the researcher Zampanò after the man died mysteriously, with deep “gouges” from a mysterious creature in his floorboards. Zampanò’s “reams and reams” of pages, “endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all,” are devoted to a documentary called The Navidson Record, which may or may not actually exist.

If the nearly six-minute film is real, what it captures can’t really be explained: A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer named Tom Navidson films a doorway inside his new Virginia home that doesn’t make sense. According to the home’s actual dimensions, the doorway (which didn’t exist when the family moved in) should dead-end to an external wall; instead, when Navidson opens the door, there’s a narrow hallway nearly ten feet long inside. Why, and how? House of Leaves eventually shifts its POV to the Navidson family and recounts what they went through while exploring the hallway, which opens into larger, more nonsensical spaces prowled by a creature who is never seen, only heard. Could the growling creature be responsible for the gouges by Zampanò’s dead body? Could it have somehow escaped containment through the documentary, or through Zampanò’s research? Is Johnny going insane because of what he’s imagined, or because of what’s real that no one else will believe?

With numerous different narrators and constant in-book bickering between characters about whether The Navidson Record is real, House of Leaves is partially an academic satire, a mocking of the kind of pedantic infighting that can drive researchers to compete and discredit each other. Far more than that, though, it’s a horror story, a grim and unsettling foray into the Navidsons’ different reactions to the mystery of their home, especially as Tom goes deeper and deeper into the mysterious space to try and understand what it is. The long stretches where Danielewski describes what Tom hears and sees are spooky enough, and when juxtaposed with Johnny’s interruptions about how even reading the story is ruining his life, they make for a uniquely spooky experience. (Also a nicely existential one, as House of Leaves grapples with a question posed by a character within it: “Is it possible to think of that place as ‘unshaped’ by human perceptions?” The book is shaped by our perceptions of domestic horror, too.)

House of Leaves is all about destabilization, and the layout of the book helps with its creepiness. The book switches between fonts, is interrupted with text boxes holding seemingly random information, is loaded down with footnotes, and includes paragraphs and columns of text that are upside down, reversed, or running vertically across the page. A page can have a box of text laid out in one direction, another laid out upside down, and three columns of text broken up vertically, or a whole page with only one word on it; the inconsistency of the thing is meant to confuse your sense of what you’re reading and push you into experiencing the actual design of the book. And that approach is also in service of the plot itself, which is dense and overlapping, but also punctuated early and often with the sense that we, just like the hallway in the Navidsons’ house, shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be reading this story, shouldn’t be allowing this impossibility into our reality. House of Leaves invites you in at the same time as it pushes you away, and it’s a must-read for Backrooms fans looking for another place where they shouldn’t trespass.