I'm something of a nerd when it comes to the paranormal. I think there's something fascinating with confronting those things we don't understand, that we can't understand. We, the living, are death-focused. We ponder the existence of life after death and the possibility of death trying to remain in the world of the living. It's provocative and it's interesting; the unexplainable will forever be at the forefront of our collective imaginations.
Sitting at a lofty 709 pages, the text and formatting make it closer to a 1400 page book. We start off in the perspective of our first narrator (there are multiple), a tattoo artist named Johnny Truant. His friend Lude shows him the apartment of a man who died. In this apartment they find pages upon pages of the former occupant's writing which is essentially what the actual book is; it is the documentation, in a scholarly style (a thesis or doctoral research paper) of a collection of footage called "The Navidson Record." In this apartment, they also find several locks on the door, fingernail scratchings in the floor, and all the windows shut lock-tight with no way of being opened. The former occupant, a man named Zampano, has compiled these pages and notated them with quotes from books that don't exist or cannot be found.
From this point on, we're essentially reading "The Navidson Record" at the same time as Truant. "The Navidson Record" turns out to be the video footage, spliced and edited post-trauma, of a family moving into a house. One day, a door appears in their hallway that wasn't there before and, upon an initial inspection by the father (simply called Navy in most instances), the hallway extends for miles...out through where their backyard should be. It is an impossible situation that logic cannot deconstruct. The halls should not exist since the backyard is still there, but they do. The door should not exist, but it does.
While we get the very academic deconstruction of the video footage (through quotes from books about the incident and scientific explanations of echoes and mythology in regards to labyrinths), we also get to see the slow fracturing of not only the Navidson family, but of our main narrator, Truant, as well. Truant's prose becomes more grandiose and lofty as each page passes. The more he reads of the document, the more he feels like he's "losing it," at one point even imagining that he leaves his apartment only to be hit by a truck, flung on to the top of his car, which is then run into by the same truck, which then spills gas and the possibility of an explosion. In fact, this moment is pure hallucination on his part. These moments come more and more often the deeper we delve into the text.
When Navidson realizes that he has a serious issue with his house, he calls not only his brother (with whom he had a rocky relationship), but also later calls in a team of outdoorsmen who are well-versed in traversing new and unexplored areas - people who have experience in intentionally getting lost. This is where the book starts getting wonky.
At first, I didn't much care for the strange formatting; footnotes ended up sideways on the upper parts of pages, bits of text were turned backwards in their own little boxes in the middle of the page (see above photo) and often contained a litany of names and places that seemed to have no real bearing on either of the two storylines running at that point. But I realized soon that, while the explorers were getting lost in this new cavernous and unexplainable hallway (for 8 DAYS!!!), the text itself was mimicking the kind of shape-changing effect that the hallway had for those involved. Nothing was static, everything was up for grabs. Stability of anything could not be counted on. Everything about these passages was psychological terror and it worked.
There are a few appendices in the back that are referred to in this first section, one of which are the letters Truant's mother sends him from a mental home while he's bouncing around from foster home to foster home. I absolutely cannot ruin my favorite letter, one that I spent an hour decoding by making words and sentences from the first letter of each word in the nonsensical text, but suffice it to say that it wasn't the first time Danielewski uses the text in an incredibly effective way to bring about more terror on the part of the reader in an effort to empathize with the characters. The process of the decoding was slow, agonizing, drawn out, and absolutely powerful. I felt my chest constrict as I realized what the hidden message said.
I have stopped at page 245 to write this because the more I read, the more engrossed I become. The explorers are lost in the cavernous hallway, which has itself produced a downward-spiraling staircase into an unimaginable black depth and more hallways and rooms for them to explore. Navidson and his brother and their friend have gone in after the explorers, knowing that something terrible has happened to one or all of them. I know that if I don't stop now, I will have finished this book by nightfall and I almost want to relish the delicious terror that is building up at a grueling pace.
Despite some very tangential movements in the storyline, both in the academic deconstruction and Truant's interludes and commentary, I'm thoroughly engrossed in this book. It's taken some serious patience to get through some of the initial chapters, but it's absolutely paying off right now. I have zero idea as to how this will end and there are very few clues leading me on. The book is a puzzle to be solved. So much so, in fact, that there is a web forum devoted to picking apart each little clue that Danielewski leaves scattered throughout the book. Like a vision of something truly terrible and unimaginable, I can't take my eyes off it for fear of losing it altogether...
* * *
The original trio of explorers haven't been heard from in several days. Will Navidson, his brother Tom, and friend Reston decide to make the trip into the void that lies beyond this door. A dark spiral staircase has been found and seems to be one of the only parts of the void that remains. It stretches up and down and outward, lengthening and shortening one's journey along it, but does not disappear. It is a landmark of sorts in this place of infinite blackness.
Halloway, one of the original trio, has since lost it. He has shot at his companions, who now cower in one of the hundreds of side rooms that seem to appear on a whim. Navidson and Reston finally find them and get them out of the "great hallway" as they've come to call it while the house seems to devour Halloway, leaving no trace of the man. He is gone.
Karen, Navidson's wife, is now preparing to leave the house. She doesn't want to stay there any longer and for good reason. The marriage is fracturing and splintering even more now. The kids have developed strange and unexplainable quirks. As Navidson, his brother and Reston emerge with the the other two explorers (one of whom has died from Halloway's shooting him), the house lashes out. Where before the house had left its actions firmly rooted behind the appearing door and in the hallway beyond, now it has moved out into every other part of the house. The black closes in on the family quickly, turning the house upside down and inside out and taking Navidson's brother with it. Navidson watches his brother, a man he's finally gotten on better terms with after so many years, get swallowed by the house.
Throughout all this are the sexual exploits of Johnny Truant and his friend Lude in the footnotes. But it's not the sexual and drug-fueled escapades that become important so much as it is the truth that becomes imperative to Johnny. He's copying every word of Zampano's original notes down and yet finds his life spiraling every downward. He never leaves his home, he loses his job, he stops eating...he looks like death to most people, but eventually goes on a kind of journey to find the house or any of the people involved in creating this whole storyline.
I hesitate to call this book a love story, though that is indeed what Navidson and Karen's story becomes; it is a reaffirmation of their love for each other once their facades have been completely ripped away over the course of the following months during their separation. Johnny Truant's story, however, feels more like that of a monk, designated to copy the story of the house down in an effort to make sure that it remains vibrant and alive despite all evidence to the contrary.
Like I said before, this book is a puzzle. After all is said and done, there are some photos of collages that have been put together, a part of which is a card of symbols for (I'm assuming) airline pilots or hikers. One of the symbols is a kind of Roman Numeral II, printed on both the inside front and back covers. This symbol means "require medical supplies." Take from that what you will.
The cover is a beautifully embossed maze convalescing into a golden spiral shape with a compass at its center. The cover is just shy of covering the whole book, which some have speculated is a metaphor for the hallway's dimensions in relation to the rest of the house; they do not coexist in the same temporal space. Their measurements will never become equal.
The deeper I get into the storylines, the more I want of the academic deconstruction of "The Navidson Record." By breaking it down from an almost nearly objective viewpoint, Danielewski allows the important moments to become supercharged with emotion without relying on terrible metaphors or bad descriptions. Keeping it academic approaches the terrorizing nature of the house against the family in a way that actually felt more terrifying as a reader.
And as much as I lost my empathy for Truant the longer the book went on, the writing in his sections was phenomenal. It was like watching a slow burn, a junkie dying a physical death, a man completely losing himself over the course of a year or two. The pacing was just right, as was the introspective nature of many of the passages. You could see that the story of the house, real or fictional, was taking its toll on Johnny. This has led some to wonder whether "The Navidson Record" is even real to Johnny. Or whether Zampano even really exists.
Fun fact: Danielewski's sister is none other than modern rock singer Poe, who created the album "Haunted" based on her brother's book. Also, my grad school friend (and righteous poet) Karen and I got to meet Danielewski at a reading some several years ago with the re-issue of "The Fifty Year Sword." You can find that picture below. We introduced ourselves and he said "Ah...a Bucho and a Biscopink (her maiden name) walk into a bar. Sounds like the start of a Pynchon novel."
Having finished this book within a week, but having not explored all the inner secrets of it quite yet, I realize that my own novel is pathetically anemic. This was Danielewski's first book and granted it may have taken him ten years to complete it, I understand how far I have to go at this point in order to achieve something of this magnitude. The pure creativity that has to exist for this kind of text to happen is through the roof and only makes me want to press harder into my own dark labyrinth of text.
