Help Identifying Weird Short Story About Impossible House

[Andy X]

Happy 2019 and a fabulous Jan, fellow Fort fans...

I am hoping that at least one of you well-read clever buggers will have come across this memorable short story written in English - which I shall now attempt to describe:

Basically, youngish American couple move into a new house. A 'secret' door is discovered and turns out to lead to pitch black corridors that go on and on...​

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The man in the couple tries his hand at exploring these spaces and eventually discovers vast lightless chambers that turn out (with the help of some very powerful torches) to be hundreds, even thousands of feet in extent. At one point there is a 200 foot-wide spiral staircase structure leading down...​

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With a few pals proper expeditions are set up with sleeping bags and supplies and everything, as one might explore a cave system - and yet this is definitely somehow a part of the house. They head further down and further on (armed) making maps as they go and some bad stuff happens with guns (IIRC).​

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Does this ring any bells with anyone? It's a very peculiar little tale...I was thinking it might be a Thomas Ligotti, but it doesn't seem to be.

I came across the story in audiobook form possibly on YouTube, though I'm not at all certain of even that. It was certainly some time in the last twelve months that I listened to it when laid up in me bed with a heavy cold ( hence my memory re. details may be a bit hazy ). I've been unable to find it again.

It's driving me up the wall, so it is :-(

Thanking you in advance for any info you might be able to offer.

 

[ravensocks]

House of Leaves? But it's not a short story. Quite the opposite.

Edit- author Mark Z. Danielewski, oops forgot the important bit.

 

[Andy X]

House of Leaves? But it's not a short story. Quite the opposite.

Edit- author Mark Z. Danielewski, oops forgot the important bit.

That's it! That's it! That's it! Thank you very much; months of frustration resolved in about 55 seconds!
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I wonder if what I heard was an abridged version or something (in any case I suspect I nodded off here and there and missed a good deal). Anyway, that's definitely the book.

You are a genius, ravensocks Thanks again.

 

[Mr_Hermolle]

House Of Leaves, now there's a disturbing book. I remember reading it over the summer of 2000, and it really unnerved me. All those endless corridors, and that spiral stairway deeper than the earth. Brr...

 

[henry]

well written ?

 

[Andy X]

Yep*, I'll be buying the book for sure.

Unfortunately I can't find the audiobook reading I remember (I'm now sure it was YT). I expect it's been removed for legalistic reasons.

*edit: 'well written'?

Unsure - was replying to previous post by Mr-H and didn't mean to appear to be commenting on the quality of the writing...I'm not sure there is an objective scale of well-writtenness that can be measured - though bad writing is much easier to spot!

 

[ravensocks]

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You are a genius, ravensocks Thanks again.

Hee! I like to think so - unfortunately I often find myself in the minority :jtease:

I really liked the book. There are a number of intersecting stories going on, so I wonder if you had come across the investigation part (The Navidson Record). I think it is well written, and it's fun to follow the various strands.

I'd recommend getting hold of the hard copy book, so the whole experience can be... well, experienced. Happy reading!

 

[ravensocks]

PS you mentioned Thomas Ligotti, who I'd never heard of, his work sounds intriguing - I'll check him out, thanks for the rec!

 

[henry]

... I'm not sure there is an objective scale of well-writtenness that can be measured ...

well that is true, then again maybe not, either way and on balance and re the précis above i would give my customary first page/two paragraphs at the shelves in waterstones before buying and then not reading

actually im getting better, 2 books last year !

 

[henry]

oh dear, and i quote from the wikipedia page, sounds irritating beyond repair :

The format and structure of House of Leaves is unconventional, with unusual page layout and style, making it a prime example of ergodic literature.[1][2] It contains copious footnotes, many of which contain footnotes themselves, including references to fictional books, films or articles.[3] Some pages contain only a few words or lines of text, arranged in strange ways to mirror the events in the story, often creating both an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic effect. The novel is also distinctive for its multiple narrators, who interact with each other in elaborate and disorienting ways.

think i will stick to my other christmas present, kermode

 

[Ulalume]

House Of Leaves, now there's a disturbing book. I remember reading it over the summer of 2000, and it really unnerved me. All those endless corridors, and that spiral stairway deeper than the earth. Brr...

That book gave me such elaborate nightmares! My copy has since mysteriously disappeared, probably sucked into some infinite space under the bed...

 

[Spookdaddy]

House of Leaves? But it's not a short story. Quite the opposite...

Yup. That as my first thought, but the short story element threw me. I wondered about Borges, but I think young couples are not common protagonists in his writing - although his psycho-architectural short stories were very clearly an influence on House of Leaves. (If generally a bit more digestible.)

(Has anyone else ever found a certain similarity of mood in Lovecraft's impossibly ancient architectural nightmares and the less grandiose - but to my kind infinitely more threatening - structural dissonance of Borges? I've often wondered if they read each other.)

Edit: Actually, they were only born around nine years apart, but if you look at publishing dates Borges could possibly have read Lovecraft, but I think his own stories were publsihed too late for Lovecraft to reciprocate.

 

[Cochise]

On a similar theme, does anyone remember a story about someone who tries to build a four dimensional house? Similar disturbing effects result. It might be Ray Bradbury.

 

[ramonmercado]

On a similar theme, does anyone remember a story about someone who tries to build a four dimensional house? Similar disturbing effects result. It might be Ray Bradbury.

And He Built A crooked House by Robert A. Heinlein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"—And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House—"

 

[Spookdaddy]

On a similar theme, does anyone remember a story about someone who tries to build a four dimensional house? Similar disturbing effects result. It might be Ray Bradbury.

You don't need four dimensions to teeter along the edge of madness; anyone who has had to perform compound joinery on roof timbers knows full well the possibilities of gibbering insanity involved in the process of combining architecture and arcane geometry.

 

[Ogdred Weary]

There's also JG Ballard's The Enormous Space adapted by the BBC:

which is a short story and has a similar plot. Though it does sound like the OP is referring to House of Leaves.

 

[Cochise]

And He Built A crooked House by Robert A. Heinlein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"—And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House—"

Ah yes. I have buried somewhere in the hoard ' The Unpleasant profession of Jonathan Hoag'. Thank you.

 

[Andy X]

On a similar theme, does anyone remember a story about someone who tries to build a four dimensional house? Similar disturbing effects result. It might be Ray Bradbury.

And He Built A crooked House by Robert A. Heinlein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"—And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House—"

Thanks both. I *think* I once read the Heinlein one but not the Ballard. So that's more reading to have a crack at.

 

[Andy X]

oh dear, and i quote from the wikipedia page, sounds irritating beyond repair :


think i will stick to my other christmas present, kermode

Hmm, that does sound a little off-putting, but then so do many outlines of literature (and music) once the artists' thought processes have been magically 'revealed' through the post-modern kaleidescope of academic analysis. I wouldn't mind betting that the author has never heard the word 'ergodic' in his life.

 

[cycleboy2]

That's it! That's it! That's it! Thank you very much; months of frustration resolved in about 55 seconds!
​

I wonder if what I heard was an abridged version or something (in any case I suspect I nodded off here and there and missed a good deal). Anyway, that's definitely the book.

You are a genius, ravensocks Thanks again.

Fantastic book. I reviewed it for a magazine and there's a quote from my review in the British edition - one of the few occasions this happened. but it's a monster of a book! And, in a decidedly Fortean twist, when I was reading it (I do all my reading in bed) my wife was getting the nightmares!!!

 

[Andy X]

Cool! Is that the Doubleday / Anchor edition?

 

[amarok2005]

I could have sworn I read that HOUSE OF LEAVES started out as a web site, and that its multilayered narrations and side-stories are due to the different web-pages being crammed into ordinary book form. I started reading HOUSE many years ago but stopped after a couple hundred pages, not because it was bad but because I had many family and financial problems. I haven't thought of it in years . . .

. . . But now I realize that the incredibly original novels I published on Amazon Kindle barely a month ago remind me strongly of HOUSE, though on a vastly smaller scale -- especially the parts with the transdimensional building I dubbed "the Big House." Really, though -- all through my childhood I dreamt of walking down the hall of our home and seeing a door that wasn't there before -- and I'd pass through into other rooms that resembled anything from living rooms with 1950s American decor to office buildings with endless concrete walls to a shopping mall (the corridor ending at a store that was selling my personal possessions!).

For some reason I frequently write (and even publish) stories or novels and then discover earlier stories that sound amazingly like them in plot. So I'll masochistically have to track them down and read them to see how close they are. Not very, usually, thank heaven, and no one's complained yet.

Still -- Well -- I'll bet no one turns into a Himalayan snow leopard in HOUSE OF LEAVES. And there's probably not a 'Possum Apocalypse or a raccoon with a chainsaw either, unlike my ENDANGERED SPECIES!

(I swear this post didn't start out as self-aggrandizement.)

 

[Andy X]

That would seem to be the case according to goodreads.com:

"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. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.​

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Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices."​

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Now this has all come as a bit of a surprise to me as only having heard the audiobook I'd assumed it was just a very imaginative, somewhat mind-bending story, not anything quite so ... experimental.

An image search turns up some of this kind of stuff:

... which reminds me of some avant-garde postmodern poetry from the late 60s / early 70s which I once tried to read but found very off-putting and a bit pretentious.

Personally, I don't mind this sort of thing in moderation, for example Douglas Adams' use of convoluted sentence structure to describe Wonko the sane's inside-out Escheresque house in whichever book it was, but a little of this kind of self-consciously technical trickery goes a long way.

I don't think I'd want to tackle the print version in this form but I'm very grateful for the help in identifying the story as, despite my preference for the audiobook-for-dummies format I absolutely love (that's not at all the right word) the nightmarish world into which the reader listener is dragged.

 

[Andy X]

Really, though -- all through my childhood I dreamt of walking down the hall of our home and seeing a door that wasn't there before -- and I'd pass through into other rooms that resembled anything from living rooms with 1950s American decor to office buildings with endless concrete walls to a shopping mall (the corridor ending at a store that was selling my personal possessions!).

I'm still having those dreams. It's quite disappointing to wake up and realise the house isn't the size of an airport and doesn't feature a museum inside a swanky hotel.

 

[amarok2005]

As a kid, in the dreams, I'd think that it was just a room everyone in my family . . . just forgot to glance into when they first moved in. There were real-world places that struck me as pretty strange, though. Our grandparents house had an attic which, from the outside, seemed to have a floor area as large as the house proper. But the attic door was a simple painted-over rectangle with no pull-cord or convenient ladder. When asked about it, my grandfather said there was nothing but junk up there, so he nailed the door shut!

. . . Might have heard the words "Yog Sothoth" occasionally emanating from upstairs, though . . .:fhtagn:

 

[brownmane]

PS you mentioned Thomas Ligotti, who I'd never heard of, his work sounds intriguing - I'll check him out, thanks for the rec!

Thomas Ligotti has many short stories and has several collections of them. I read "Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe" collection recently. A very good collection. I enjoy horror and dark fantasy fiction and originally came across his writing in horror anthologies.

Unfortunately, if you don't sell millions of copies, you generally are not well known. I am generally stuck with ordering books from Chapters (a company that bought out most of the small bookstores in Canada) and finding UK authors or even US authors who are good writers, but don't have the sales is difficult. I can order from small presses, but shipping and exchange rates are ridiculous. I could order e-books, but I like the hard copies. And I would download so many, that I'd never read them. I already have a fairly large TBR pile in my house.

And it's funny that "House of Leaves" is being discussed. I had just recently heard of it. As AndyX mentioned, I too heard about it on Goodreads. though I can't remember why I searched for it. I also heard the story about it travelling around on the web in bits and pieces. Coincidence?

I haven't decided if I want to expend the energy to acquire a copy, but the writing style as described intrigues me.

 

[amarok2005]

As usual, I'm in the middle of about 30 different books at the moment, but as memories of the first 200 pages or so of HOL come back, I want to dive into it again . . . as if I had the time.

 

[Frasier Buddolph]

In this same vein, you might also enjoy "House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson.

 

[Ogdred Weary]

I wasn't crazy about HotB, liked the first half where it's Fantasy/Action/Horror but found the later stages where the protagonists is having visions or travelling through time or whatever interminable, the latter parts of some Lovecraft is similar.

 

[Andy X]

It true that Lovecraft could go on a bit. It's a bit like some prog rock and jazz, where after the initial thrill of the originality of the ideas the third and fourth guitar solos seem a bit surplus to requirements and the law of diminishing returns asserts itself.