My favorite book is a regrettably little-known tome called
House of Leaves. It's about a tattoo artist who struggles with his personal life. No, wait. It's about a tattoo artist who struggles to manage his personal life while trying to edit a book that he found written on scraps of paper in a dead man's apartment. No, wait. It's about a family who discover that their house is bigger on the inside than on the outside and the documentary that they made about it, which is entirely fictional and the subject of a fictional criticism written by a dead man on scraps of paper that a tattoo artist is trying to assemble into something resembling a book.
...that's about as close as I can get.
It's a terrifying novel and a deeply touching one, as much a romance as a horror. It is one of the few books that has actually frightened me, and one of the few works of art in general to do so. But despite that, these reasons are not why it is my favorite book.
This is why. [Note: I don't *think* there's any language in that image, but Johnny's footnotes can be a bit vulgar at times, so be warned that some inappropriate content may be in the text.]
House of Leaves plays with the structure of a novel in such novel ways (hahahahaha see what I did there) - at one point, there is a single word per page, and you're flipping through them at such a frantic pace that your heart starts racing along with the character's heart. It gets really insane at times, as you can see in that image. There are footnotes within footnotes within footnotes. It functions as a deconstruction of the novel, a satire of academic criticism, a genuinely frightening horror novel, a touching romance novel, and an experimental bit of insanity. It's a wonderful work of art and continues to blow me away.
