“House of Leaves” is a novel written by Mark Z. Danielewski and was first published on Mar. 7, 2000, to critical acclaim. The book follows Johnny Truant, a man who finds an analysis of the documentary “The Navidson Record,” written by a man named Zampano. Truant finds it following Zampano’s death and proceeds to obsess over it. The caveat is that The Navidson Record is not a real documentary and that most of the citations are either partially or entirely fabricated.

Over the course of the book, Truant slowly begins to lose his sanity and begins hallucinating events from the fictional film. By the end of the book, he has completely lost his mind and has isolated himself completely from his friends and the outside world.

The Navidson Record is the most famous aspect of the story. It revolves around Pulitzer-Prize- winning journalist William Navidson and his family moving into a house on Ash Tree Lane. However, they soon discover that their house is bigger on the inside than the outside and that it is constantly shifting its walls as if to keep them in. At the end of the book, the entire house collapses in on itself and vanishes entirely.

Many have described “House of Leaves” as a breach in reality, feeling as if it should not exist or that it feels wrong to hold a copy of it, which continues to the book’s mystical and unnerving nature. Even the pages of House of Leaves seem to credit this, with the text shifting and changing and, by the end, becoming nearly illegible, with the reader being required to turn the whole book to read on.

The book has sparked several depictions over the years, the most famous of which being Myhouse.wad, which follows a man losing his childhood friend and inheriting an unfinished DOOM map, which he proceeds to publish while going insane. “My House” only furthered the popularization of “House of Leaves” and brought it to the front of modern horror.