How many people living in the United States today are illiterate? Let us assume these people can read traffic signs and don’t have to mark their signature with an X, but overall they live in a world without text. Information comes to them in sound and images. This functional illiteracy does not put these individuals, who surely number in the millions and may constitute a majority, among the dumbest of the dumb. It was for centuries the natural state of humanity. The government of Turkey, within the memory of people now living, employed town criers to spread its edicts to villages where being able to read a newspaper was enough to make a man a café celebrity. 

Mark Z. Danielewski can do a lot more than read a newspaper. He studied English at Yale under the poet John Hollander and then pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts, where he worked on an award-winning documentary about Jacques Derrida. After collecting his last academic degree in 1993, he began work on a horror novel that would take advantage of all his erudition. By the time it was published in 2000, it would be a horror novel to mark the end of the age of literacy. 

House of Leaves is about a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, moves his family to suburban Virginia in search of domestic bliss after a career spent in war zones. He starts to notice closets that weren’t there before. A door suddenly appears in the den leading to a hallway, a door, and then a branching labyrinth. Sometimes the labyrinth leads to a cavernous room with mile-high ceilings, sometimes to a spiral staircase going down, sometimes just to more hallways. Navidson brings in his brother and later a professional mountaineer to explore this labyrinth, which emits a curious growl. Is it a monster or just the house expanding and contracting?

The novel is presented as a collection of found texts. Our “editor,” Johnny Truant, is a tattoo artist in Los Angeles who comes into possession of a trunk of papers collected by a blind man known as Zampanò. The papers concern a film, The Navidson Record, depicting the exploration of the house and its inhabitants’ descent into homicidal madness. Johnny eventually concludes that the film never existed, but Zampanò’s book-length commentary cites hundreds of academic articles that treat the film and its characters as real, such as “Isaiah Rosen, PhD., Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Records (Baltimore: Eddie Hapax Press, 1995).”

There is another layer of metanarrative on top of this, which, when as a sixteen-year-old I came across House of Leaves in the local independent bookstore, was invigorating. The front jacket flap opens: “Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet.” There is a vertiginous moment on page five hundred twelve of the novel when at a bar in Flagstaff, Arizona, Johnny hears the band start singing about a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. When he inquires, the guitarist hands him a tattered manuscript of the very book the reader is now holding. “But be careful,” he warns. “It’ll change your life.”

(In another blurring of the line between fiction and reality, the song Johnny supposedly overhears, “5 & ½ Minute Hallway,” really does exist. You can buy it on iTunes. It was written by Danielewski’s sister, Anne, who performs under the name Poe, for her concept album Haunted, a companion piece to House of Leaves released at the same time. The album is mainly about the singer’s difficult relationship with her father, a Polish documentarian and film professor, and is interspersed with clips from a collection of self-recorded audio cassettes that the Danielewski siblings found after his death. He seems to have been a difficult man.) 

The horror of the Navidson house, leaving aside the monster for a moment, is clearly a metaphor for deconstruction. What if words did not mean what we think they mean? What if it were impossible for words to have stable meaning at all? What if the whole universe of symbols on which we have built the house of our civilization were shifting and unstable? In Johnny Truant’s preface, he warns the reader what will happen if she reads on: “Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all . . . Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted.” This is the Derrida the author read in college put to good use. 

The earliest method Navidson tries for getting a handle on the labyrinth is echoes. When he comes to a room so vast that his flashlight can’t find the opposite wall, he shouts and waits for his voice to come back to him, to give him some sense of the size of the space. Zampanò annotates this moment with a litany of examples of echoes (taken, according to Zampanò’s footnote, from the book The Figure of Echo by Danielewski’s real-life professor John Hollander) where exact repetition yields a completely different meaning. Such as:

Chi dara fine al gran dolore?

L’ore.

Who will be put an end to this great sadness?

The hours passing.

Of course, what is horror to the literate man, to the preliterate or postliterate man is simply the way of the universe. Among the strange properties of the labyrinth is that objects disintegrate if you leave them alone. The mountaineer tries marking his pathway with glow-in-the-dark decals and pylons, but when he circles back, they are either gone or in fragments. The buttons on his jacket and even the laces on his shoes disappear. “It’s kind of scary,” he says. “Like you stop thinking about something and it vanishes.” This is the impermanence that haunts societies without the written word. When enough people forget about something, it’s as if it never existed. 

House of Leaves was published four years after another doorstop-sized postmodern novel about a film that doesn’t exist. Both Infinite Jest and House of Leaves are animated by the same anxiety, how to be a novelist in a world where novels don’t matter. If the only people who are going to read this are the tiny minority with three advanced degrees like me, then why bother writing a novel at all? David Foster Wallace and Danielewski could already tell that the study of fiction in the twenty-first century would be a tiny sect with no more bearing on the broader culture than model ship building. At one level this was liberating, because it meant they could make their novels as demanding as they wanted, but it also threw into question the value of the whole enterprise.

For Wallace, the villain was visual media. Novels simply could not compete with the addictiveness of television. The plot of Infinite Jest revolves around a mysterious film so engrossing that everyone who sees it starves to death because they lose interest in anything but the film. As an author, Wallace knew firsthand the tiny universe of people who run M.F.A. programs and literary magazines and decide which novels get published, and he knew how little that world mattered to anyone not professionally connected to it. Trying to figure out how to overcome this insularity, he realized he was up against not just the decline of prose fiction but the decline of literacy itself. If he wanted to reach the ordinary man on the street, he could not do so with words on a page.

For Danielewski, the danger was coming from inside the house. Text wasn’t being slain by visual media, it was undermining itself with its own ambiguity and instability. Navidson has a bad conscience about his career as a photojournalist, wondering if he has really done anything with his pictures except exploit other people’s suffering for the entertainment of newspaper readers. He wants to get away from New York and do something real.

Specifically, he moves to Virginia to save his relationship with his partner, Karen. They’ve been together for years and had two children but never married, for generic bohemian reasons. Karen writes in her diary after the horrors start: “This house, this home, was supposed to help us get closer. It was supposed to be better and stronger than some stupid marriage vow. It was supposed to make us a family.” Most people think of vows as what makes a relationship real. Karen and Navidson want something more real than words. But they search in vain. So words are insubstantial, Danielewski is saying, but it’s not as if we have a better alternative. Learn to live in the labyrinth.

There was a monster sneaking up behind Danielewski the whole time he was writing this novel, and that monster was the Internet. When Danielewski was writing, everything on the Internet was text-based, even the video games (“You are standing in a dark forest”), because pictures took forever to load on dial-up. Twenty years later, hardly anything important is text-based. The kids don’t even use text for texting. They send pictures and videos. The unbeatable advantage of text in the age of mass media was that it was the best way for anyone who didn’t own their own film studio to send a message across time and space. That advantage disappeared with the advent of TikTok.

House of Leaves is the last literate horror novel in the sense that you could not possibly make a movie out of it, but also in the sense that it is preoccupied with postmodern intellectual puzzles that hardly seem to matter in retrospect. The little paradoxes of language that loomed so large in the 1990s no longer seem worth arguing over. Oh, no, meaning is unstable. Well, say what you like about the written word, at least it really did create a lasting record. It yielded human beings with attention spans longer than thirty seconds. Perhaps its meaning was not as permanent as Derrida would have liked, but it was more permanent than what came after it. Danielewski and Wallace both share a sesquipedalian tic, throwing out words like “amaurotic” and “fuliginous” as if they might be the last men ever to do so. As it proved, they were.

The thrill of reading House of Leaves as a teenager was the feeling of being in an elite minority. For all you knew, the book really did get passed around for years samizdat-style among “musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies” just as the dust jacket said. That is how I felt at sixteen. Now I look around at the TikTok generation, with their fruit fly memories for the past and incapacity for complex reasoning, and realize how few we really are, and that is a horror more terrifying.