I can’t remember where I first heard about it, but somewhere I read that Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves was one of the main inspirations for the MarbleHornets YouTube videos, which has become one of my absolute favourite horror narratives. You may remember me writing about them a while ago, and if you haven’t been keeping tabs on them, they’re back for a ‘second season’ after several months’ hiatus, as creepy and enigmatic as ever.

Anyway, being a fan of terrifying myself with videos of the Slender Man, or ‘The Operator’ as he is known in MarbleHornets, I cajoled my mother into buying me Danielewski’s cult novel for Christmas. After reading the first few pages I remember thinking something along the lines of “this might be one of the most important novels since Ulysses”, which put me in mind of a quote from the experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson where he asked “Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened?” True House of Leaves is very much more towards the post-modern than the modern, but it has very strong elements of modernism in the Joycean stream-of-consciousness side-notes of its main protagonist, and in its relentless T. S. Eliot-style theft of famous literary and mythological phrases.

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She had a commitment to magic, Tim thought, as he watched Gemma brush her hair; a commitment to glitter and sparkle, to pretty clothes, and looking pretty, and to the manufacture of pretty pictures. In his own way, he too was committed to fantasy and fabrication. They had little else in common, but that suited them. “We’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend, you know,” she had said several weeks before. “I know,” he replied. “I haven’t got time for a boyfriend; it just complicates things.” Instead they had sex, animal and meaningless, regularly, at weekends usually.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

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Ah, I thought I was going to keep my promise and post this yesterday, but it’s just gone past midnight.

I don’t feel that’s entirely my fault: I was called into work unexpectedly and have only just, fighting through post-work, food and shower drowsiness found the time to make the final edits of this story, which I fear might not actually stand up to any hyperbolic statements I may or may not have made about it (I’m really too tired to remember what I said about it, if anything). Regardless, it is a good story, possibly a great one, and I think there’s a fair bit going on in it, which I hope will come across in subsequent re-readings of the story, if not the first time through.

So, yes, I am proud to have this as my one hundredth post, and I hope you all enjoy it,

Henry.

The New House

“Hey,” said Kate, “hey, stranger.”

She grabbed Jay’s arm, brought him to a stop in the cloying heat of an August Saturday as he picked his way through the crowd. People continued to push past, making little, if any, concession.

“Hey,” he said, looking at her, surprised.

“You nearly walked right past me,” she said.

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“I’m going to the toilet,” Rich said.

“Okay,” said Steph.

Rich stood and crossed the bar. As he pushed open the door to the toilet he looked back at Steph. She was sitting on a stool at a table by the window, with her fist pressed into her cheek, watching people walk by. She was pretty, in a way, but Rich had thought about breaking up with her today. He still was thinking about it. He entered the toilet.
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“When are we going to have sex?” the girl asked.

“When you say ‘I love you’ and I say ‘I love you’,” the boy replied.

“I love you,” the girl said.

The boy looked at her and he felt sad.