House Of Leaves - Tapa blanda

A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly 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 Danielewski'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

Johnny Truant, wild and troubled sometime employee in an L.A. tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in his apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Record.

Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his wife and two children moved into a new house. Some of what happened next was recorded on videotapes and in interviews. An edited version was released in the cinema. It was a sensation. The Navidsons are household names throughout America. Camille Paglia, Paul Auster, Stephen King have all written about the Navidson Record. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on it.

But Johnny Truant has never heard of it. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him . . .

Intricately structured and immensely imaginative, looking like few other books ever written, this is the ghost story's coming of age.

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.