House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 
☀️☀️☀️

This is, unsurprisingly, an incredibly difficult book to read AND review. I fully appreciate the challenge laid out by Danielewski and he deserves praise for attempting something so wildly ambitious. I would say I enjoyed about half of this and barely tolerated the other half, which is how I came to the middle-of-the-road rating. 

For the sake of brevity I'll be referring to the multiple narratives as #1 (Truant's storyline), #2 (Zampano's notes, the textual analysis), and #3 (Navinson's documentary and the house)

#3 was undoubtedly the hook of this book and the most successful component. This is where the narrative was compelling and made best use of the formatting gimmick to serve that narrative. #2 was enjoyable in parts (but was ultimately excessive in scale) and did reflect Zampano's decline well with the formatting; it also highlights the sheer potential embedded in #3 by devoting hundreds of pages to analysing the pseudo-documentary. #1 was mindnumbingly boring and felt like it was written by a teenager on Wattpad trying to be 'cool' and 'edgy'. I cared so little about his own decline that it weakened the power of the concept overall. 

I'm sure there are layers to this book I haven't uncovered and would get some sort of satisfaction out of exploring, but the time and effort required to do so wouldn't give me enough pleasure to bother doing it. 

This book is challenging, confronting and a rest of stamina. I wanted to be more scared than I was; I wanted to skim less than I did. It is worth diving into if you are seeking a new and different reading experience but I'm not sure I can totally recommend it.