At one point, readers have to decode a letter. Whole passages appear upside down and backward, stretching all over the page and forcing the reader to physically engage. The word 'house' appears in blue ink every time it appears (including on the cover), and different narrators are denoted by different fonts – Courier New for Johnny, Times New Roman for Zampanò. Perhaps this leads to the most widely recognizable aspect of the story - its bizarre structure. Although it took time, I began to feel for Johnny and his dysfunction, hoping he would get out of the hole he keeps digging for himself. His prose is juvenile and his exploits egotistical, eventually culminating in a section that warrants a trigger warning as his mental state begins to unravel.īut as you dive deeper into his story and learn about his mentally ill mother, the full picture comes together. Throughout the story, Johnny recounts his misadventures with sex, drugs and alcohol, like a teenager who just learned what intercourse is. However, it is Johnny who is at the heart of the narrative which is why it's unfortunate his section is the most troubling to get through. Events take on an almost Lovecraftian aesthetic as you start to believe the family is in danger from their own house.

The story told within 'The Navidson Record' is the centerpiece of the plot, with the family living their daily lives, occasionally exploring the darkened hallways that lead into an endless labyrinth of corridors and staircases.Īt times, the dense academic writing style can get boring to read, but when the story picks up, things become haunting. If it sounds like a headache-inducing premise, you aren't wrong. The twist? The film doesn't exist, and Johnny can't find any record of it. The manuscript is an academic criticism of a documentary called 'The Navidson Record,' which follows the family of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist as they move into a new home, which itself is growing bigger on the inside than on the outside.

The story follows a Los Angeles-based tattoo artist named Johnny Truant, who discovers a mysterious manuscript in the apartment of a recently deceased, blind man named Zampanò.

Mark z danielewski