the eighth day is upon us already. time sure moves quick. it's time for today's prompt
#8 - that's not a real place
@cabbage-drop's post for this day made me think about incongruous spaces, too, and what better opportunity to talk about my favorite book House of Leaves. it's a weird, deep, postmodern and cult-classic book so maybe actually most people on cohost have already heard of this one. it's by Mark Z. Danielewski! it centers around a horror narrative involving a guy discovering a weird hallway in his family's home that shouldn't extend as far as it does. he tries to document this anomaly, do research, see how far it goes and to where, and the situation gets more menacing and dire as he goes.
buuut, this is where it gets cool - that's just one part of the story, there's meta-narrative stuff going on, including a guy discovering this whole 'incongruous house ordeal' by running across assembled documents/video about it that an old blind man meticulously put together. (the author loves this multiple-interconnected-but-distinct narrative thing, he does it in nearly all his work and it rules.) and, imo the coolest thing about the book, it's laid out very uniquely across the pages. art will be created on individual pages/sections for effect, like having only a few scattershot words on a page to represent bullet holes, or the text gradually condensing into a small part of the page to claustrophobically convey a tightening crawlspace. it's covered in extensive footnotes that contribute to the story, redacted bits, colorful words, extensive appendices to refer to, and different fonts for different purposes (many of these things are also staples of Danielewski's work).
i love this book a lot! if that sounds even halfway interesting to you i can't recommend it enough. it's dense but as you get into it, you will find yourself lost in the mysterious hallways of its text........ the author also wrote an incredibly ambitious yet unfinished series, The Familiar, about a girl who finds a cat and experiences strange phenomena. that one has NINE distinct narratives that had intent to interweave more and more, and imo was beautifully written; each of the perspectives had their own dedicated chapters and were a very diverse cast. the writing style often felt like you were experiencing the events as the characters themselves; sometimes this was quite visceral, like the girl's mom who suffered from anxiety (and her texts were always written with multiple nested parentheses (like this (which is all too relatable (for me i mean)))). like a favorite-but-niche TV series, it was cancelled, or perhaps put on hiatus, but afaik he has no intention of returning to it. still, five books of it exist, and it's a really interesting world to explore.
