What an absolutely strange book!? It’s a horror love story narrated by a damaged, paranoid maybe schizophrenic, as pulled off in documentary form. The sheet number of footnotes is a testament to a certain madness itself.
Most striking is the book itself. I mean, quite literally, the pages, binding, type etc. A casual flip through the pages is a startling experience; oddly spaced text, font changes galore, flipped text, mirrored words, scattered poems and cross outs. The term, I believe, is ergodic literature. Passing through the airport, my bag was pulled for screening. TSA skimmed the book; I got some strange looks.
My initial reaction to the “ornamentation” was one of dismissal. It seemed gimmicky. About halfway through, when the weirdness really starts, I found myself won over. The text, a physical element, proved as disorienting as Navidsons house was to that character. I’m not alone in discovering the odd format to be psychologically jarring.
Greater implication? House of Leaves is not the sort of book I would write, but it has convinced me that format matters. There is a tangible difference between a paperback and a hardcover. Digital novels are even more disorienting than that.
My claim, unimportant as may be, is that digital media devices will change how stories are read. Not only will popular stories of the future be written to digest the strengths of a new format, but old stories will be reappraised thusly as well. A new canon of classics will arise from digital ashes.
What will this format look like? I would guess that short micro-chapters will reign supreme. Stories will, novelized or not, take on an episodic nature. Terseness and short sentences will prevail, a general trend regardless. Vocabulary however will become more diverse. The easy access to an “in reader thesaurus” will make the barrier to big word entry just a little less.
Most of all, the biggest change will be the verisimilitude of sourcing. Ancillary material, both real and fictional, will be linked into the primary text. Stories, even between authors, will interconnect (almost literally but I’m cautious to say so) between themselves much like the Cthulhu mythos, but on a much more mythic scale.
Jump cut: I promised Vegas stories. Next week…maybe… no promises.
