House Of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski, son of a film director who co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, grew up in Utah, is in his mid-thirties and was educated at Harvard, where he was taught by Harold Bloom. He attended the most prestigious film school in America at the University of Southern California and has written a number of screenplays. His sister, Poe, is a cult rock star in the States.

Mark Z. Danielewski, son of a film director who co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, grew up in Utah and was educated at Harvard, where he was taught by Harold Bloom. He attended the most prestigious film school in America at the University of Southern California and has written a number of screenplays. Ten years in the writing, House of Leaves - his first novel - was first published in 2000. His sister, Poe, is a cult rock star in the States. He lives in Los Angeles.

"A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distresingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent - it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark's feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?" -- Bret Easton Ellis "Genre-defying ... a novel in which something is always lurking just out of sight ... at once a genuinely scary chiller, a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read." Observer "This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down or persuasively conclude reading. In fact, when you purchase your copy you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly, still trapped in the web of its malicious, beautiful pages." Jonathan Lethem "Superbly inventive ... a rare debut: genuinely exciting." Guardian "There is a core of dark power in House of Leaves and a sense of return to the great dark matter of American literature: the haunted houses of Hawthorne, Poe and Lovecraft ... one of the few fictions genuinely to approach the nightmarish." Independent