19. The Princess Bride (30th Anniversary Edition)

By William Goldman

12. Looking Glass Sound

By Catriona Ward 

Looking Glass Sound was another well-written novel by Catriona Ward and also the third book I've read from her (the first being the impressive Rawblood and disappointing The Last House on Needless Street). 

 

I felt a bit cheated by Looking Glass Sound.  I was interested in the book because it was influenced by Stephen King's mysteries set in Maine, but the the meta-fictional nonlinear narrative complexity sidelined me out of a good story. I didn't want to constantly wonder what/who was real and what/who wasn't nor marvel at the writerliness of it all.  Why spend time on something that swallowed up my time with overly-complicated authorial wanking?

So I'm going to cheat myself and use AI to help provide an overview:

Looking Glass Sound is a complex, meta-fictional psychological thriller that explores the blurring lines between memory, reality, and authorship. Narrated by Wilder Harlow, it focuses on a fateful summer in Maine involving an unlikely friendship between three teenagers, a serial killer (the Dagger Man), stolen narratives, and the haunting, constantly questioning what is real versus what is constructed. 

Layered Narrative: The book is designed like a nesting doll, where stories are told and retold, with small differences revealing how memory and stories are altered.

Plot Outline: Wilder is an awkward teen spending the summer at his belated uncle's house in coastal Maine during the 1980s.  He befriends a local boy named Nat and a red-haired British girl named Harper.  For some years now, the town has been haunted by two mysteries: missing women and "The Dagger Man" who breaks into homes during the night to photograph sleeping children with a dagger by their throat and leaving behind a Polaroid, as if to say, I could've easily have killed them while you were asleep. 

Meta-Fiction: The story deals with a writer (Wilder) whose work is stolen and published by another, leading to a blurred reality where he is haunted by the fictional versions of his friends, not the real people. 

Key Themes: The nature of storytelling, the obsession of writing, trauma, and the vulnerability of adolescence. 

The Title: Refers to the deceptive nature of stories and reality, much like a mirror image or sound echoing, distorted, off the water. 

This WeirdLit reddit thread was very helpful in breaking down the structure of the novel. If I ever want to remember what the hell I had read, I should read this thread.

Back to the plot outline.  The novel began as a kind of coming-of-age story with a murder mystery as a backdrop, and with Maine as the setting, it was meant to intentionally invoke 1980s Stephen King. The kids stumble upon the bodies trapped in oil drums underwater and the murderer was revealed about one-quarter into the novel. Nat dies, Harper moves back to England and Wilder becomes haunted by the events of that summer.  In college he works out his trauma by writing about that summer, but his story is stolen by his best friend, Skye aka Pierce Montague.

Summary:

We begin to read excerpts from both the stolen story and Wilder’s version, following Wilder years down the road as he returns to the coast to finally write his book. But Wilder is haunted by, he eventually discovers, the characters from the stolen book— not the real people, but the fictional versions as written by the two writers. The books and reality blur and, the deeper you go, the more you start to wonder what’s real and what’s not. Ward takes you on a twisty-turny journey to reveal how stories capture people— trapping them forever. The mystery of the dagger man is but a thread in the larger narrative— the killer’s identity being revealed and re-revealed over and over again. In the end, everything you thought to be true isn’t, touching on how point of view radically alters reality.

By the time I figured out what was going on with Looking Glass Sound, I began to lose interest in it. Wilder becomes haunted by the characters from Skye's stolen novel. The ghostly drowned woman that Wilder kept seeing, Rebecca, just kept dragging on and on.  Even though Skye/Pierce was supposed to be dead, Wilder found him in a hole when he tried to kill himself with hemlock. Skye had been trapped there for weeks, feeding on raw crab and cave water!!  Skye and Wilder got back together as old men - one blind and the other missing a hand!  I kept going, what the hell am I reading? Then a supposedly "new" character Pearl was introduced about 3/4 into the narrative. By the time it got to Pearl and Harper meeting at Fairview, I just didn't care that much anymore.  I think the novel had made clear that Pearl and Harper were fictional, with the added meta-ness that other characters were made-up by the characters in the novel. Even if Pearl and Harper were the "real" first-level versions and not meta-authorized creations like Skye/Pierce, I had given up being invested in ANY of the characters. Which was ironic since the friendship between Pearl and Harper felt more constructed than the meta-fabricated characters.  It even felt like Ward was getting tired of her own story, as it was more an overly complex exercise than actual storytelling.

So it turned out Wilder and Nat were half brothers?  Harper really did mercy kill Nat?  Gracie is the daughter of Nat and Harper? Whoop-dee-doo. The reveals came too late!  I felt bad because I had been quite invested in Wilder, but his "true" character had died shortly after his story was stolen by Skye/Pearl.  The older Wilder was actually a fictional recreation by Pearl.  He was never able to get any revenge on or justice from Pearl.  Harper was the tragic figure who lost the ones she loved and the only one who could right some wrongs.  In the end she had her daughter Gracie and they manage to get some kind of reckoning from Pearl.

Back to the reddit thread:  

"But why would that be the case, and why has Ward chosen to write such a confusing book? The theme of narrative ownership and true crime has come up a lot in recent years: The Plot ( Jean Hanff Korelitz) concerns a professor who steals one of his grad students' novel ideas, a decision that comes to enrich and destroy him. In I Have Some Questions for You (Rebecca Makkai) boarding school students re-open the murder case of their teacher's long-ago roommate, while a true-crime podcaster does the same. Trust Exercise (Susan Choi) is a layered puzzle-box of a novel that is about a high school drama class, truth-telling, and feeling your way around in the dark. And then there's the real-life controversies that have rocked the world of letters: a plagiarism allegation lobbed at My Dark Vanessa; the real story behind "Cat Person;" and who could forget the saga of the Bad Art Friend?

Writers are all thieves of a kind, but personal testimony was recently a very powerful kind of currency—subject to counterfeit—and the true crime boom still goes on. We're in the midst of two simultaneous national conversations about authorship (who gets to tell what kind of story) and trauma. Authors are grappling with it in real time."

So I get what Ward was trying to do with Looking Glass Sound.  But did it capture the zeitgeist?  It probably did - I can see how many would consider it brilliant.  However, the meta-fiction genre isn't my jam - I want to lose myself in a narrative, not get confused by it.  I did enjoy parts of it, especially the first act as it had some great fiction writing; lots of lovely passages about the sea, air and land.  The meta parts reminded me so much of House of Leaves and David Mitchell's work.  Talented writers often have the ambition of tackling meta-fiction, but there's always the danger of being burdened by textual slog as the human interest parts of the story get buried under the ambitions of the author to create narrative feats of complexity.  

I acquired this hardcover from https://bookoutlet.ca for only $8 and will be including it in my trade pile when I visit Encore Books on my birthday!

5. House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I requested Hubs to get me House of Leaves last Xmas and got the Remastered Full Color Edition (2000).  Apparently, the Remastered edition gives a “fuller” experience and adds another layer of meaning.   

 

In Remastered Full Color Edition edition:

• Any iteration of the word "house" appears in blue, even in the blurbs section and the publication page where it mentions “Random House, Inc."
• The word "minotaur" and all crossed-out passages appear in red.
• There is one line written in purple, which is important because of what the color implies for the story.
• The pictures in the appendices are full color.
• There's a bit in the book written in braille with a translation in the footnotes.

 

In the two-color edition (with the doorknob cover):

• EITHER "house" appears in blue OR "minotaur"/crossed out passages appear in red. One or the other, not both. It's a gamble which you'll get.
• The line that is purple in the full color is not written in purple.
• The braille bit doesn't appear.
• The pictures in the appendices might be color or they might be black and white. Again, it's a gamble.

 

I’ve been curious about House of Leaves for some years, but its ambitious density and heft had seemed somewhat daunting.  As I delved more into horror fiction over the past few years, it was becoming apparent that House of Leaves was required reading if I was to be a true fan of the genre.  It’s got a bit of everything:  a 'haunted' house, super-natural horror, mystery, psychological thriller, unreliable narrator(s), survival labyrinth horror(?)… there’s even a love story.

 

If you get past the multi-layered experimental meta-fiction and epistolary complexity, there’s a very simple story at heart.  Johnny Truant, a disaffected 25 yr old in LA, discovers a chest full of scribbled notes and an unfinished manuscript left by his friend’s blind and elderly neighbour, Zampanò, who died of mysterious circumstances.  The manuscript focuses on "The Navidson Record", a documentary film directed by acclaimed photojournalist, Will Navidson.

 

"The Navidson Record" documents how Navidson and his family move into their new home in the Virginia suburbs.  They soon discover that their house is not normal, at least physically.  It started off as a puzzle - why was there a discrepancy of 3/4 of an inch between the inside and outside measurements of the house?  This seemingly small difference triggers Navidson's obsessive tendencies to find an explanation for these spatial discrepancies and sets in motion a series of increasingly unsettling events. The house then exhibits further anomalies, like a closet appearing where there was previously a blank wall.  A door appears in the living room revealing a dark and vast liminal space that is not physically possible if you stand outside the house.  When the house reveals itself to contain a seemingly endless labyrinth, Navidson contacts his estranged brother Tom and an old friend Reson to mount an exploration of its hidden dimensions. Navidson's obsession with the labyrinth leads him and his family into increasingly terrifying situations.

 

Navidson, Tom and Reston soon realize they are way in over their heads when the walls of the labyrinth start to shift and they barely find their way back “home” inside the “normal” confines of the house.  They hire a professional explorer, Holloway Roberts, and his two assistants, Kirby “Wax” Hook and Jed Leeder to mount a proper expedition armed with gear and camera equipment.  Needless to say, the expedition goes awry as the men get lost and Holloway goes crazy, a la Jack Torrance and goes on a bit of a rampage. 

 

House of Leaves is a bit of a sausage fest, but there are some sections devoted to Navidson’s long-time partner Karen and their strained relationship.

 

Zampanò's claims that "The Navidson Record" :

became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze The Navidson Record purely as a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.

(from Wikipedia)

It should be noted that in the flyleaf, House of Leaves is authored by Zampanò with the Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.  There’s a contrast in mood and style between the Navidson and Johnny Truant sections.  There are the obvious tonal differences between the strained domesticity inside the house on Ash Tree Lane Virginia (portrayed via various media) versus Zampanò's dry academic writing style versus the slacker lifestyle of an assistant tattooist in an urban metropolis. 

 

Johnny Truant reminded me of the protagonist in The Cipher.  Within Nicholas, there already existed an existential emptiness when he came upon The Funhole in the dingey basement of his apartment building.  Nicholas hopelessly pined after the cold-hearted Nakota while Truant kept hooking up with Zampanò’s former readers and they all happen to be physically attractive.  Johnny became obsessed with Zampanò’s manuscript soon after he discovered the box full of his notebooks.  As he immersed himself in Zampanò’s world, it was akin to going down a rabbit hole, or the Funhole for Nicholas.  Both characters began to change (for the worse) as their obsession started taking over their lives, exerting a destructive toll on their mental and physically health.  

 

The book interweaves the text written by Zampanò and Truant.  There's also a third party, the “Editors”.  Visually and structurally, there's intertextual playfulness and cleverness aplenty.  It also plays heavily with footnotes.  Sometimes the footnotes take over the pages and there are even footnotes for the footnotes.

 

With an ever-present tension between what was supposed to real or fabricated, it seemed a given that the author must create a book where the text reflected this interplay, as well as the impossibility of the house on Ash Tree Lane.  At certain points, the text became moving pieces.  Some pages had only a few sentences while a page was completely blank except for one innocuous word.  When the labyrinth suddenly expanded, the text expanded with it, or contracted, etc.  At another point, you had to read the text backwards.  It was pretty neat.

In terms of conventional genres, there were elements of horror, mystery, and psychological thriller.  Most of that narrative was found in "The Navidson Record" (the text by Zampanò).  For me, those sections about the house on Ash Tree Lane were the most riveting parts from House of Leaves.  

 

I don’t think I’m alone in that the Truant sections were the least-liked in House of Leaves.  In one forum, a reader asked if they could skip over some of the more indulgent passages and someone else said that you should really try to stick through it and read everything. 

 

The narrative that was woven through "The Navidson Record" was a mixed bag.  The horror wasn’t really all that scary, though there were sections that were definitely peculiar or uncanny.  The love story was meh.  Some say, at its heart, House of Leaves was a love story.  But narrative mostly portrayed the strained relationship between Will and Karen, the typical famous artist/intrepid adventurer who cannot stay within the confines of domesticity for stretches of time. I really thought Navidson was going to fulfill his death-wish and be lost inside the house forever, but Karen finds Navidson in the end, his body weak and broken.  It made me think of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  The only way Karen & Navidson could be together was if Navidson was so crippled, he could not on any more adventures.

 

The mystery was the most gripping part for me, at least in the beginning, as I was wondered what the fuck was up with that house?  But I quickly realized the mystery of the house was the mystery of human nature externalized as a familiar structure.  And how the author was toying with his reader right from the start.

About a quarter into the book (not counting the appendices and index which also takes up a quarter of the book’s thickness), Navidson mentioned someone in his past named Delial.  The reader soon learns that Navidson became famous for a photo he took called “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.
Serendipitously, a couple of days before, I had learned about this very photo in my FB feed, a “real” photo taken by real-life photojournalist, Kevin Carter.  I even googled him so his story was fresh on my mind.
 
So right away I knew Navidson was based on Kevin Carter who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his a photo of a skeletal child stopping to rest while a vulture watched nearby, taken while he was documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan.  Even though the photo was known as “TheVulture and the Little Girl”, the child was later revealed to be a boy. In House of Leaves, the child was always a girl.
 
Four months after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, Carter died by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 at age 33.  Apparently, Carter received a lot of criticism about that award-winning photograph, but it seemed like PTSD, poverty and despair were also contributing factors to his suicide. His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken (a deceased colleague) if I am that lucky.

Although the text reveals that Navidson was based on a real-life person (another “proof” that Zampano had fabricated "The Navidson Record"), I found the Kevin Carter reference to be rather heavy-handed and almost in poor taste, as it exploited someone’s real-life tragedy.  There was a letter that Navidson wrote to Karen in Chapter XVII that made reference to Delial and tried to capture the deep pain he must have felt being complacent in the face of human suffering.  It echoed Carter's suicide note, felt phony and was the only big misstep (though I was only half-way through) in my immersion into House of Leaves.

 

Apparently, it took Danielewski a good ten years to write House of Leaves, and it shows in the denseness and complexity of the text.  But with such an ambitious scope, it was also uneven and unwieldy in parts.  

 

When I was close to finishing H of L, I was also looking at the colour printed end paper of the book and read the note apparently written by Zampano:

Appendix C:

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad is scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a barrier in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she falls to her death. Let both parents experience. Let their narcissism find a new object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

Apparently, this is another clue that "The Navidson Record" was fabricated by Zampano/Danielewski.

Another head-slapping moment for me was on p.465 when Navidson was on his last Exploration #5.  His batteries and flares were dwindling and he had only one book with him to pass the time.  Guess which book it was. Fucking House of Leaves!  OMG.  When Navidson had no more light source, he started lighting matches so he could keep reading.  Before his last match burned out, he lit the pages from the book he had just finished reading...  You can’t get any more meta than this.  It's beyond meta - it’s the snake eating itself.  And it confirmed for me that House of Leaves was not only an elaborate exercise in meta-ness, but also an elaborate gimmick.

 

Overall, HoL was still a wonderfully layered and immersive book. It was clever, even brilliant in its playfulness and experimentation.  Without a doubt, it pushed the boundaries of print, text, structure, time, space, and fictional meta-ness.  The book itself was about the nature of our perceptions.  What was also brilliant was that House of Leaves itself, like "The Navidson Record", had generated its own amount of “multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture.”

 

There’s a reddit forum for House of Leaves fans.  One person has even compiled a list of all work, real and fake, referenced in House of Leaves.

 

My only disappointment was at some of the content, which was not as original as its format and execution.  Using Kevin Carter’s story and his photograph kind of cheapened the experience for me.  Johnny Truant reminded me too much of Nicholas in The Cipher. Kathe Koja's novel was published in 1991, so it's very possible that Danielewski would’ve been inspired by it when he was working on House of Leaves.

 

I even asked Google: Did The Cipher influence House of Leaves?

AI Overview:  The Cipher by Kathe Koja and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski share thematic similarities, particularly in their exploration of "malicious non-space". Both novels feature uncanny spaces that are not easily explained by traditional horror tropes of violation or wrongdoing. House of Leaves incorporates ciphers and codes, both within the text and in in the physical layout, mirroring the coded messages in Koja's The Cipher. 

 

Although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I was without a doubt glad I got to experience House of Leaves.  It only took me two months and one week to finish it.