House of Leaves is the debut novel of the American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. It takes the form of an academic text by Zampanò, a recently deceased blind scholar, about The Navidson Record — a documentary film in which the Navidson family, having moved into a new home in Virginia and installed cameras throughout, captures the discovery that the house is somehow a quarter inch larger on the inside than on the outside.
The manuscript has been edited by Johnny Truant, an apprentice at a Los Angeles tattoo parlor who claims never to have met Zampanò. Truant interjects footnotes ranging from fact-checks to seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes, and a group of editors who claim never to have met Truant annotate him in turn. Citations of nonexistent works, appendices and an index, pages holding only a few words, and pages that must be rotated to be read make it a prime example of ergodic literature.
Danielewski spent some ten years writing it, and sections circulated on the internet before publication. It became a bestseller, was translated into many languages and gained a considerable cult following. It is most often described as horror, though the author has also endorsed readers’ interpretation of it as a love story.