#it’s not too scary yet but I did get to the one part where truant was like ‘don’t look through your peripheral vision. imagine the killer.’

[mrs-elijah-wood]

This is how reading house of leaves is making me feel rn:

[bondsmagii]

I picked up a copy (2nd edition with color and all) of House of Leaves at work today, and I just started reading it! Ngl, I did flip ahead and saw the formatting of some pages, which is what really sold it to me, in addition to your posts, being egged on by my coworker and boss when I asked if we had it in stock, and finding out that a recent grad at my uni did their thesis on this book. I plan to read this regardless, but I'm also realizing that this may end up being super close to my/my families experiences growing up, and I was curious if I could get a heads up?

I am still terrified of the dark, and have never slept in a pitch dark room in my 20 years of life because I panic so badly. Both my brother and I have had vivid and gory nightmares from a young age for unknown reasons (I still get them when I think of home; they feel more real than here when I wake up and often the pain lingers too). Also the walls of our house used to bleed, the walls would crack because the house would move and then settle back to close the cracks up due to a support beam loosening and tightening in a wall, even after the wall was taken down and the beam thing welded into place). And my brother and I share the same fear of a man who sits in the corner of our room growing up and watched us (my dad had the same belief as a kid when he grew up in the same house). And there were some incidents with magnets and time.

Now I do have some issues but I am Not Psychotic (yet), for what it's worth, but I was wondering if I could get a heads up how close to home this book might hit? I'll probably read it regardless, but there seems like a chance it might make life feel a little less real in specific ways that I'm concerned about already. If you don't wanna that's cool too, I respect that. I am really excited to read this though as everything about it seems like my kind of book

god, the book is so, so good. I'd definitely encourage giving it a go if you can! overall, the book isn't straightforwardly scary, like, it's not like what you'd expect from a standard horror book. but, it does deal a lot with existential threat/questions, and it is a meta book -- as in, it professes to exist as it does in its own universe, in this universe. Johnny Truant, the in-universe editor, is convinced that the threat can spread to readers simply from viewing the material. there's a lot of him speaking directly to you, warning you about the dangers of reading the book, and there's a lot of very evocative writing about his own descent into madness and the potential threats to you (including passages where he tells you to imagine things, or tries to convince you that something is lurking behind you -- a passage that myself and many others have been physically affected by).

it definitely makes life feel a bit weird. that's a big part of reading it, and pretty much everyone I've ever known or spoken to has this experience. it does stick with you, and it does linger, and it does make everything seem strange. I found this to be pleasant -- I love it when books do that -- but it might be something that you want to look out for. to be honest, for all I talk about the uselessness of the 'unreality' tag, House of Leaves is something I would use as a brilliant example of something that is actually dealing with unreality.

in terms of House Terror, I don't think it should hit too close to home for you. it's not a haunting. the house itself is an existential impossibility, filled with inconsistent measurements and an entire ever-changing labyrinth. there is a lot of emphasis on the dark, though, and detailed descriptions of characters in completely dark spaces. one of the characters, Karen, is also severely claustrophobic, so there's detailed descriptions of dark/enclosed space-triggered panic attacks, if that's something that might bother you. there are also detailed descriptions of vivid nightmares, and especially in Johnny's sections, there's some more straightforward monster horror as well. in terms of the kind of thing you've experienced, though, I think the closest you'd come would be the moving walls. even so, this house in the book is so far outside such comparatively minor movements that I don't think you'd really see it on the same scale at all.

I hope this helps! if you have any further questions let me know, because this is a great book and I'd love if you could get to read it. if anything gets a little too close, don't be afraid to hit me up and I'll give you a summary so you can skip the part and read on if you want.