1/4"

I just finished book #3 in a year!  Jesus Christ, this looks even more pathetic despite the fact that it's actually becoming gradually less pathetic (and I am exaggerating because I exclude books for school and one that was short enough that I read it in one sitting)  Anyway, the book was House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Be forewarned if you decide to read this book: it is an incredibly confusing novel.  The bulk of the book centers itself around a man named Will Navidson, who in the fictional universe of this novel, took the above Pulitzer-Prize winning photo of a Sudanese girl he named Delial who died soon after the photo was taken.  He and his claustrophobic wife, Karen, buy a house in some ambiguous location in Virginia that somehow ends up being slightly larger on the inside than it is on the outside.  Initially it is 1/4" larger, but this measurement increases slightly the more Navidson and his wheelchair-confined friend Billy Reston and his brother Tom try to find a way to measure the house and eliminate this "spatial rape".  Well, as happens with all quasi-horror plots, the house is actually really fucked up.  Not necessarily haunted, but weird as balls.  Rooms expand and contract in small increments unnoticed, doors appear in different places, and eventually, a completely dark, silent, featureless, and cold hallway appears behind one of the doors that appears to extend beyond the boundaries of the outer wall of his house.  Navidson has the spirit of an adventurer and is determined to see what is beyond that door, while his wife is much more concerned with her own safety and the safety of their two children, Chad and Daisy.  So they hire an initially reluctant but later intrigued group of professional climbers/explorers and such to document what the hell is going on in this weird house.  And basically (spoiler alert!), it's a big, scary labyrinth.

This is strictly the first layer of House of Leaves - this is an imaginary film called The Navidson Record, and we are reading an extremely intellectual, pretentious analysis/summary/documentary about the film that Navidson made and the slew of sub-films and essays that followed.  Because, you know, it's pretty weird, even for fictional characters.  The dude who wrote it is named Zampanò, and he's blind.  Which raises a whole lot of questions as to why he wrote about a film.  Or did he make up the film?  I don't know.  Anyway, after the guy dies, the third layer of the novel imposes itself on us - a lost soul by the name of Johnny Truant.  He had a rough childhood in foster care as his father died unexpectedly and his mother was institutionalized when he was young, and ends up as an apprentice at a tattoo parlor and in love with a stripper he names Thumper when the story begins.  Then he finds The Navidson Record and starts to lose his mind as he attempts to piece together the confusing jumble of notes left for him by Zampanò.  He sometimes interjects into the story with lengthy footnotes that explain some day-to-day experiences that reflect his failing grip on reality as he progresses through the many layers and labyrinthine structure of The Navidson Record.

So basically, this is not a book for people prone to migraines.  This is a damn confusing book.  The recurring theme of the labyrinth is often reflected by the format of the words on the pages themselves.  Often, the book delves into a series of footnotes upon footnotes, often occupying several pages of text - these contain innumerable references to sources that are occasionally fictional and that occasionally exist in reality.  Other times the main text is rearranged to reflect the events of the story - sometimes stretching, sometimes condensed into one corner, sometimes twisting and arcing and sometimes even written so that it can only be read in a mirror.  It's absurd and clever at the same time.  A personal highlight actually came in one of the appendices - Truant's mother writes him a series of letters from her mental institution that disturbingly details her descent into madness in a way that basically reflects the events of The Navidson Record.  Even through the spatial rape and abyssal blackness of the house and creeping monsters in the dark, this proved to be the most unsettling for me.  Oh well, I guess I'm just weird.  

If your house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, you just might be a redneck.