House of Leaves

This was the focus of my first article as a faculty member at MacEwan. I started in 2008. In the summer we bought a house and turned one of the rooms into a nursery. My partner was pregnant with our first child, a son. In August, she traveled back to Winnipeg to finish her contract as a school psychologist. I was left alone in the house, with the empty nursery, and a copy of House of Leaves. The book purports to be a book a young miscreant named Truant found and then tried to edit. The book he found is an extended film analysis—written by a blind, now dead, scholar. The film is a documentary—by and about a photographer and father who discovers a hallway in his new house that is bigger on the inside than the house is on the outside. The space keeps getting bigger, more complex, infinity dark. It seems even to affect the book itself. Copies are known to fall apart. Some pages are upside down; some can only be read in a mirror. One of Truant’s many footnotes tells of a new mother and her infant son in an ICU. My article was hard to write, and I still worry I was using the wrong edition. Many are thought to exist. But all likely begin with the same warning: "This is not for you."