Enter House

So The Familiar: One Rainy Day in May is done. Finished it last week, at the end of a two-week trip to New Mexico, between mountain overlooks, museums of modernist art, and gut-busting meals loaded with beans, chilies, cheese, and chicken. Possibly not the best choice for a vacation read, given its heft, but I was already halfway through it when the trip began, so it was what it was.

I read it as a comparison point to one of my old favorites by the same author, House of Leaves, coincidentally selected by a member of the book club I’m in as a good spooky read for October. The club met on Sunday. Only half the group finished the book, and reactions were mixed and about what you’d expect, if you’ve read HoL yourself: an amount of appreciation for the central story of the house; frustrations with the sex/drugs juvenilia of the Johnny Truant sections (fair) and the meticulous academese of the Zampanò sections (also fair—though I don’t think it’s without intention); pained annoyance with the multiple fonts and their acid-trip layout.

One person in the club described it as “adversarial,” and it got me thinking a lot about why I respond to and find myself so energized by the book when many others find it so forbidding. I think it might come down, in part, to one’s background with certain games.

I mentioned at the end of my Goodreads/Storygraph review that I’d be curious to see Danielewski take a swing at an Infocom-esque text-based adventure game. If you were, like me, a kid raised on such games, and then later on point-and-click adventure games—where a lot of the action is, essentially, following and actively carrying out a story by moving in and out of rooms, carefully examining objects and documents, etc.—then you’re likely to respond differently to a text that presents itself as full of additional clues, if you’re willing to do the digging to find them.

This has been part of Danielewski’s MO his whole career, in HoL, Only Revolutions, and The Familiar. He’s constantly planting easter eggs and dropping references in his works, but he’s also crafting them as carefully architected objects that you almost feel you can crawl over and inside of until you find their darkest and most hidden corners. They’re made to be explored as much as to be read. And his diehard readers (and here I’m talking not about myself but about the serious Reddit threaders and forum posters) have responded by poring over every footnote, aside, and bit of back matter. Their annotations for The Familiar were a godsend when I got to the heavy Singlish chapters.

Other authors have attempted similarly intricate texts, but they often fail by foregrounding the puzzlery at the expense of the story. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. comes with a goddamn decoder wheel and secret messages hidden in the main text and marginalia, but its narrative is a complete bore. HoL, for all its gimmicks, is still trying to entice the reader to continue through reveals and cliffhangers (surprise, Zampanò is blind; keep reading to see if Navidson makes it out of the house after going back in; etc). It’s plotty as hell, it’s a juicy plot, and through that the book actively invites you, like a good adventure game, to keep reading, keep digging, keep playing.

But I have to remind myself that not everyone finds that rewarding. We all bring our own set of expectations, and we all have different things that light up our brains. So if you’re thinking of picking up a Danielewski, ask yourself when’s the last time you enjoyed an adventure game.