#im love johnny truant

[deadkinwalking]

I've just finished the main body of House of Leaves and now only have the exhibits and appendices to look through.

Before I began reading I had no idea what to expect, and yet this book still managed to exceed my expectations. It was a slow start, the text is incredibly dense and at first I had trouble remembering who was writing which footnotes. But the story absolutely blew me away! Zampanó's writing on the Navidson Record is so in-depth it almost had me believing it was real. I wonder how many of the references cited are real and how many fake.

I've read that some people skip over Johnny's longer footnotes because they find them annoying, but I simply can not understand that. Johnny's experience is intrinsic to the story! Plus, he's my special little man 🥺 please don't ignore him, you'll make him sad. He even mentions this in chapter 21: "Wherever I walk people turn from me. I'm unclean."

[afklancelot]

yknow what imma elaborate on one of my earlier posts today cuz

i dont actually mind people disliking johnny truant and his sections. is even understandable, really. i still think his sex scenes are abstract enough to not be squeamish but the sections where he rambles without paragraph spacing (a bit of a pet peeve for me) are hard to parse and can give me a headache.

besides, when rereading the book i tend to skip the Navidson Records in favor of Johnny’s segments since while i like malevolent architecture, i like ‘protagonist descends into madness’ stories just as much if not more, so not like i got high ground

what i will suggest tho is that you read the whole book from cover to cover (index not included, tho there are some easter eggs) w/o skipping sections, whether Navidson Record or Johnny’s, at least once. afterwards you can read only specific sections and skip the rest, but at least read each section to its end once before reserving judgement on em. admittedly its gonna be hard and grueling, hell i had to read/finish HoL through a PDF myself, but tbh you get a lot of experience from reading all of it through

[speakingviscera]

hi johnny truant hiiiiiiii

sketch + explanations under break

^ sketch/lineart since you cant really see it in the actual drawing lol.

afaik, theres no real concrete description of what he looks like (aside from very vague stuff + his arm scars), so i just made some shit up based off his lifestyle lmfao.

i reallyyyyy wanted to make the golden ratio blue to match the house, but it just didnt look good no matter how i twisted it around - dark blue just didnt pop.

im happy with this in the end, though - i think i made the vision work.

i love johnny too, his footnotes were a breath of fresh air after the Horror bits of the navidson record. though i am taking him at a bit face value, i.e. assuming johnny is like a real person and kind of just ignoring some more creative theories on his identity.

[strangestcase]

im gonna be real im skipping half of what Johnny Truant says. In part because I don’t give a fuck about his aggressively cishet love life and in part because a good chunk of it is just some shit like “so big and so stinky and it’s chasing me no no no” I KNOW that’s supposed to make it realistic but it’s also incomprehensible.

not skipping a single part of zampano’s article though. I’m having a ball looking for all the little numbers

[butchdykekondraki]

if i was johnny truant i simply wouldnt have let that shit happen to me. this is because the house wouldve loved me actually. rip to him but im different. i get her

[unhingednovelist]

tag game: your favourite novel of all time

share a little about your favourite novel of all time! give us some reasons why you love it, ramble on for a bit. i am going to ramble, so go absolutely feral about it. i don't mind. i don't think anyone else does either.

also tag some others who you think would love to participate!

tagging: @stesierra, @anonymousfoz, @olivescales3, @hallwriteblr, @asher-orion-writes, @wrenibimben, & @reamous23 - no pressure to participate of course!! anyone else feel free to join in too!

it's probably not surprising to hear my favourite novel of all time is house of leaves by mark z. danielewski!!

okay. so for real i would not have written the art of betrayal, my own published novel, without house of leaves. i got my copy for my 15th birthday, and a day later, i started writing taob!

sure, it's not a book for everyone, but it was certainly a book for me. sure, there are skippable parts (ie. johnny every time he has a one-night-stand because im ace and can't stand it). and sure it's confusing but OUGHHH THIS BOOK

hi yes i am planning to get at least five (5) passages of this novel tattooed on me at some point in my life. its construction as a visual storyteller is unmatched, and the dark recesses that this narrative reaches is pretty unparalleled.

my absolute favourite thing about it is that the novel is written almost as if it's examining itself. which is so bizarre. especially when you are reminded that this was danielewski's debut novel and he would have had no idea the cultural impact it would have, and yet here the novel is talking about becoming ingrained into the country's cultural experience.

okay ramble over

tldr: i love house of leaves nearly all of the time but not so much when johnny truant (the protag) is horny

[selamat-linting]

early notes about reading house of leaves :

-there is a pattern about longing for something you cant have anymore and how one copes with it by creating stories or narratives inside your head to make sense of the loss. zampano's book about filmography and photography written despite his blindness, johnny's rumination about his dead father and the huge blank space that is his mother (havent read her letters yet) and the way he constantly covers up stories of his life with fake stories. something something the passage on nobody really wants to know the real cause of the scars on his arm. and maybe making up stories about it helps him forget about it too.

-blending of reality and fiction!!! i havent played umineko yet, mostly know stuff from osmosis but thats what reminds me of it. also, if i assume the navidson records is a hoax (technically the movie doesnt exist but fuck it'll be a tangent just to unpack all of That) i really really love the way navidson incorporates his actual irl life and marriage problems to his fictional(?) movie and even ask his kids to join in on the hoax. maybe because im a wrestling fan but theres just something very precious about it. same as the long tangents. all of the character voices felt deeply personal but theyre self aware that this is a part of a fictional story theyre making and its like slicing yourself open to put it under the scrutiny of millions who expect grand closures and clear narrative arcs when your life is messy and pathetic.

-truant lies about his sex life. some of it is daydreaming. like come on, you believe he's that kind of chick magnet? a ratty tattoo artist with mommy and daddy issues who most likely never showers? i mean, i would fuck him, but i'm an exception of the rule. and yes i can tell he reeks, i just do.

-i know that passage about the house as filled with the culmination of the suffering of its past inhabitants misery was supposed to some stupid essayist opinion that zampano hates, but that concept actually fucks.

[slopmaster9000]

Ah, I didn’t make the connection that all of the Bible stories included were Old Testament. Thanks for clearing that up. I see what you mean about the connection between truants mother and the Minotaur that he encounters, especially with the scene where it reaches for his neck. I don’t necessarily understand how that reading connects her to the house itself, but I definitely think that she ‘haunts’ Johnny’s entire narrative, especially how he engages with zampano’s text. The imagery which paints the house itself as a mother figure also interests me in this context. I would be interested to hear your thoughts, if you felt like sharing.

OH YEAH i completely glossed over the bits portraying the house as a maternal figure that makes my theory even better

im absolutely gonna dive deep here: i wouldn't go so far as to say that truant's mother wrote the entire book, but it's completely possible considering the title page is in the same font as her writing in the whalestoe letters. also note that in her letters she constantly said that she felt lost in the institute and was kept apart from what she loved¹ (much like how the house destroyed karen and navidson's relationship, holloway's composure, chad and daisy's innocence, and tom's life). the institute is the house, and that's further exemplified by the fact that when johnny visited the institute he saw a "vine-entwined tree" (read: ash tree) in her room². my theory is that the minotaur is truant's mother, because if she didn't really write the book, then why would there be a struck passage in one of truant's footnotes?³ truant himself said that struck and colored passages were parts where zampanò tried to cross out references to the minotaur. the struck passage in question is just before the story about the child in the hospital and his mother, saying "what i'm remembering now," presumably written by his mother herself. the story itself is really intriguing and i can write about it in a separate post, but what im really getting at here is that jonah and the whale, navidson and the house, the mother and the whalestoe institute, are all exactly the same.

¹House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000, p. 624

²Ibid. p. 504

³Ibid. p. 518

[vraska-theunseen]

reading "you feel it just below the ribs" it's a fictional autobiography for a woman who lived in an alternate 20th century. its prefaced in the introduction that the events are unreliable and that they're not endorsed by the Society (form of government in the book) and there are little footnotes throughout it making little apparently just historical corrections to the text made by an editor. but as it goes on the footnotes are getting more opinionated and aggressive like "dr gregory stating that this time was completely disorganised is a disservice to relief programs that went out at the time" and "dr gregory has a lot of opinions about Societal Council laws for someone who doesn't read the news" and it's like im slowly thinking hey. maybe this editor doesn't have the best interests at mind. maybe it did happen like dr gregory is saying and it's like a 1984 thing of history being rewritten. it's also fun because not really anything interesting is even happening but im still so drawn in my it. that's not right exactly but i mean i don't think it's something i'd normally be interested in it's just a memoir of a psychologist who made a lot of effects on policy in a new governmental system after the effects of a devastating world conflict but im so enraptured by it. actually saying that its not something i'd normally be interested in isn't even right because i loved house of leaves. i love kind of vaguely crescendoing ominous false histories and manuscripts with editor's footnotes that aren't as reliable as they may seem (johnny truant isn't reliable at all im definitely talking only about you feel it just below the ribs with that last part). i don't even know what my point is with this post bc i got distracted thinking about house of leaves and forgot what i was going to say. anyway i love books

[tillman]

like i hate johnny truant but also at the same time im squishing him like a sucklet . he is a squeaky toy in my mind and i am the dog about to tear him to shreds in a final act of love 

[afklancelot]

recently got into HOL and my silly autism brain has taken the reigns with this book. anyways i would (capital L) Love to hear your theories/hidden symbolism notes on this book if youre willing to share

hello yea id love to! doubt it will be coherent at all cuz i didnt take notes but ill do my best

one of the more prevalent theories of HoL is that Pelafina is the true author of the book. The fact that "A Novel" text on the front page, the "First Edition" text, and the text Johnny uses just before getting into the baby story is purple, and Pelafina often being associated with purple, is definitely not a coincidence. In addition, the baby story being about a mother and her dying baby alludes to Pelafina and Johnny, implying Johnny never existed, at least as an adult (either he died as a baby/stillborn, or his mother actually succeeded in strangling him as a kid). One of Pelafina's coded letters (there's at least two if i remember correctly) also mentions Zampano, so it's plausible that Zampano was Pelafina's lover and later disappeared from her life, and Pelafina integrated him into the book she was writing.

A bit minor in terms of symbolism, but notably the word "changeling", according to the index, is only used two times: one in Johnny's section, and one in Pelafina's section. Johnny's a changeling in that he makes up stories to protect himself: pretend to be someone he's not, and he never told anyone, at least in LA, about his actual childhood. Pretty obvious, yes. Pelafina's also a changeling as well using the "Pelafina is the true author and Johnny was dead all along/never existed to begin with", in that she acts like johnny is alive by sending letters to him, when in reality he was killed by her/died in birth/never existed. She pretends to be someone she's not by acting like a mother, in other words.

That said, while I see the Pelafina author theory as the most plausible theory for HoL, i kinda ignore it cuz imagining a world w/o Johnny Truant makes me sad :,)

a connecting theme for all of HoL is obsession. Will obsesses over the house's changing architecture, Holloway obsesses over a potential beast within the labyrinth, Johnny obsesses over the manuscript of The Navidson Record, hell, even Karen expresses obsession in trying to ignore the house (through Feng Shui and whatnot). And of course, there's what happens when obsession takes hold, best seen in Will and Karen neglecting their kids and each other (Will moreso), Holloway's refusal to abandon a 'mission' and shooting Jed thinking the latter was the beast, Johnny not going outside his apartment for days on end and losing time, not seeing his friends at all, you get the drift. We the readers even emulate it, obsessing over the book, what it meant, and what actually was real or not. It's only when Will burns the book be brought, House of Leaves, that things start to take a turn for the better: he lets go of his obsession of the house, Karen rescues him, and they live a happier life away from the house. Also seen when Johnny meets the band who shows him the book as well, as the very last passage in chronological terms has him finding closure over finding the book in the band's hands ("It's going to be alright. It's going to be alright"). not rlly hidden symbolism or a theory but i always love talking bout the obsession theme and stuff.

also one more thing: Johnny thinks the number nine is connected with him, and seeing his math i can't disagree. what's interesting, and i found out only recently from going thru the eht namuh website, is that the number nine in the Bible is a symbol of finality and completeness (as a TF fan, this statement feels ironic). His musing pops up around his final chapter he actually appears in the book, where while it does leave him w an ambiguous ending, it also completes his story arc, including giving him some closure. idk where im going with this but it's just something neat.

[twoticky]

im begging u to post the review <3 im on my knees rn

ohhh boy here we go!

Julien's Super Official Review of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

first of all i gotta say this is like the densest weirdest "horror" book you will ever read. no shit there are several pages just dedicated to naming nearly every famous building/work of architecture ever to exist! the majority of it is written in a faux-academic tone, so if that's already not your thing stop right here. or keep reading if you want to hear me rant about literature for many many paragraphs.

the basic plot of the book is that a man (will navidson) and his family move into a suburban house that seems relatively ordinary until they discover it's bigger on the inside. following this reveal a lot more weird shit happens, including a mysterious door appearing in navidson's living room leading... further in. HOWEVER -- and here's the big catch -- this isn't actually the subject of the book! this is the plot of a fictional film called the navidson record, and the actual text of the book is an analysis of the film written by a man called zampanô, EXCEPT that said analysis is actually a text found by the real narrator, johnny truant, after zampanô's death. still following?

i'm probably making it sound completely confusing and/or like a total slog to get through -- which it definitely could be, believe me! (and i haven't even touched on johnny truant's character. or the significant amounts of Deeply Unnecessary sexual content. did we really need a graphic description of a prostate orgasm, mark? did we really?)

and yet! there were some parts that totally slapped! i'm a total slut for weird horror and experimental fiction, and my absolute favorite horror trope is weird & haunted houses (i mean, even my url is based off that!). if you wished that shirley jackson's the haunting of hill house had a fiction interview with anne rice and contained quotes from homer you're in the right place. im already a bit fond of this book just for being so fucking weird, (how many times have i said "weird" by now? like five?) & the weirdness of house of leaves is pulled off surprisingly well. all three central characters have distinct personalities and voices that come through really clearly and johnny truant isn't necessarily a likeable character but god damn is he complicated! the story is disturbing, too, but the weird detachment of the format makes some of the creepiest moments lose their immediacy (not all of them, though). ultimately i think the way it's told -- including the boring parts -- are part of the story and altho i don't love all of them i respect them as choices.

my only real, genuine, bone to pick is that the treatment of women in the book is pretty ehhhhhh. you'll notice all three central characters are men, and johnny p overtly objectifies the women in his life in an Uncomfy way. (remember what i said abt all the sex scenes?) navidson's wife, karen green, gets to have a bigger part in the story as it goes on, and i'm not saying writing a misogynistic character always makes someone a misogynist, but, like, to my ladies out there i just want yall to have a full disclaimer.

tldr if you don't want to read my long rambling mess: this book is terrible to read AND well written AND totally insufferable AND the cause of all my nightmares <3 if you want to read a real weird book you won't be disappointed, but like... it's hardly light summer reading or necessarily y'know fun. i'm kind of conflicted on it myself, but for whatever it's worth im glad i spent many hours of my life reading whatever the fuck this was.

ALSO: i'd really advise looking up the TWs for this book b4 u read bc there's a lot of Heavy Content of various descriptions. thestorygraph has good community-sourced trigger warnings but if you know of any other sites pls drop em in the notes!

[antirealisation]

Hello who wants more “Serpent processing his own shit talking about House of Leaves.” I wasn’t even thinking about the goddamn book, getting ready for sleep then suddenly WAIT. What if I wrote a LONG POST about Johnny’s perception of himself as traumatised and more specifically this (or maybe just my -- we’ve never read much other analysis, except like to translate Latin or whatever) impulse to read a lot of Johnny Truant’s symptoms as traumagenic, but importantly, not in a way that he himself recognises.

Like, “Oh, he has a panic/dissociative/psychotic attack after filling needles with purple ink -- y’know, purple, as in his mom’s fingernails -- but he doesn’t realise that because Trauma and Denial etc. Easy.”

(And that was part of why I was feeling so bad the other day, like, here I am projecting onto a character who has a pretty multiply traumatic past, where a lot of his issues could be in part a response to Real Actual Trauma. Sure, the details are a bit exotraumatic, “Why am I seeing so much blood and gore, why do I have to make sure that my studio isn’t changing in size,” but the base, the origin of it?)

But then there’s another attack that also gets prefaced with “purple,” but nonliterally: “A few days later, I heard her [a one-night stand] on KROQ’s Love Line, this time drenched in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Caroll how I--’this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere!’...” (p. 149). And it freaks him out hearing this woman talk about how he screams in his sleep, which basically sends him tumbling into that “Oh no. How do I know this?” attack.

And “purple” there feels a bit more. contrived. Not, like, on Danielewski’s behalf, that’s not the level I’m ever caring about lol who cares about that dude, but Johnny, who still has his mom’s letters in which she talks about trying to kill him and mentioning her purple fingernails then. Suddenly finding it unfair to think that Johnny doesn’t make some connections to his trauma. He just doesn’t present it in the story even though there’s no real reason to think he’s particularly amnesic or in denial about things (see: how he talks about his foster dad and broken tooth, pp. 92-93 in particular for those following along at home -- he’s cagey about actually writing it down for an audience, but I dunno if you can fault him for that), and the other assumption being that if he did recognise it as caused by trauma, the symptoms wouldn't be as bad as they are and getting worse, because trauma isn't meant to do that, but I mean, there’s that whole bit about uhh lemme find the place again

“You like that crap [old abandoned things] because it reminds you of you. Couldn’t of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don’t even disagree with it either. Seem pretty dead on and probably has everything to do with the fact that when I was ten my father died and almost nine years later my crazy Shakespearean mother followed him, a story I’ve already lived and really don’t need to retell here.

Still for whatever reason, and this my Counselor for Disaffected Youth could never explain, accepting his analysis hardly altered the way I felt. (p. 21)

But affecting a connection to trauma even if he might not believe it himself, ~look it’s purple~? 100% projecting here (ie sounds like something I’d do, my “everything is at least five layers of irony at all times”), especially if this is when he’s trying to tell himself, “Maybe it’s not just exotrauma this book that’s ruining my life. What happens then, if I finish the book and it’s still not over?”

Write down hints that it could (should) just be something else, biology or an inescapable childhood, even if you’re putting it in kinda contrived ways that you don’t entirely believe. One of Johnny’s goddamn main character traits is <IS SMART, ESPECIALLY ABOUT LANGUAGE>, do you think he’d ever write the word “purple” without some tinge of recognition of that that colour could mean to him? I feel that way about “red.” I’m not lying about the projection, processing via meta :D

What I’m saying is

Despite claiming in Chapter One that “the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film,” Zampanò has still wandered into his own discussion of “the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank” within The Navidson Record. I have no idea whether it’s on purpose or not. Sometimes I’m certain it is. (p. 149 -- same page, by the way!)

>:/

[tillman]

i for one 100% support the gay porn johnny truant. in the world there has to be someone who wants him and im so proud of you for taking the bullet. (/j i didn't like him so much as a character but i loved his place in the narrative as conveying n reflecting the events in the house but i support u nonetheless also 100% agree on zampano's analysis actually just being fucking dope)

NOOO I DONT THINK HES HOT I WOULD NEVER KISS HIM I just think the concept of gay porn johnny truant is so hysterical