Characters / House of Leaves

The many bizarre characters in House of Leaves, divided based on which layer of story they inhabit.

The Navidson Record

The House

The House

The titular location around which the narrative of The Navidson Record — and possibly the whole book — is focused. While it is superficially just a normal house from the outside, on the inside it is slowly revealed to be a terrifying and eldritch object or being with a physics-defying labyrinth at it's center. Its nature and motivations are inscrutable at best, madness-inducing at worst... for the characters and reader alike.

---

• Alien Geometries: The fact that it's Bigger on the Inside is arguably the least weird thing about it.
• Ambiguous Innocence: Whether or not it's actually malicious in a way that humans can understand is as unclear as everything else about it. Some scenes possibly suggest that it is actively antagonistic and sadistic towards the people inside it, while others suggest that it simply doesn't think like we do or is even trying to help its inhabitants in its own strange way. At the minimum, it's completely disconnected from human concepts of morality and behavior.
• Ambiguous Situation: Literally everything about it. The House defies any and all attempts to explain it or its behavior and every answer given to its nature just raises more questions.
• Animal Lover: Bizarrely enough. Its terrorizing of the Navidsons and anybody relating to them doesn't extend to their pets, which are entirely left alone and even safely deposited outside if they go near the labyrinth itself. Whether this is some kind of strange Pet the Dog thing or its powers simply don't affect animals isn't clear.
• Antagonist Title: It is the house of the title and its malign influence infects every level of the story from The Navidson Record upward.
• Apple of Discord: It has an eerie tendency to play this role towards its inhabitants and those who try to study it, driving them mad or letting the stress of the investigation rip open old wounds.
• Big Bad: It's unknown if it's sentient or even real, but it directly plays this role for The Navidson Record, and is something of a Greater-Scope Villain for Johnny's side of the story.
• Bigger on the Inside: The first weird thing discovered about it. Its inner dimensions do not match its outer dimensions, with the inside of the House being a few inches bigger than the outside. It gets worse from there.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: A possible interpretation of the house is that it is actually trying to help or communicate with the Navidsons and other humans, but operates in ways incomprehensible to mortals. A lot of what the House does can be interpreted as a twisted and clumsy attempt at wish fulfillment, for instance.
• Brown Note: Everybody who sets foot in or interacts with it in any way suffers some kind of adverse effects — both physical and mental — and the book even includes a chart discussing these effects and noting that they seem to depend on level and length of exposure.
• Color Motif: Blue, obviously. Black to a lesser extent.
• Disproportionate Retribution: If you interpret certain actions it takes as being retaliatory, then its insanely vindictive towards those who anger it and inflicts absolutely horrifying punishment on them. Most notably, it might have killed Tom just for teasing it.
• Eldritch Location: Putting it mildly. The House only looks like a normal building from the outside. On the inside, its inner dimensions are completely out of wack and its most defining feature is a massive, constantly changing labyrinth that might have some kind of monster in it.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The labyrinth within it is repeatedly noted to always be extremely cold regardless of the temperature in the House proper or outside. This becomes a rather terrifying plot point when Will gets trapped in said labyrinth in the climax. He ends up losing several body parts to hypothermia and frostbite.
• Evil Is Petty: When Tom at one point mocks the House while alone at the top of the spiral staircase, the House seems to maliciously contort the staircase in a way designed to frighten and threaten him. It's also implied that this taunting might be why it later kills Tom. The rampage where it does so may itself have been prompted by the House being pissed off over Hook managing to escape the labyrinth instead of dying with Jed and Holloway.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: One interpretation is that, either directly through the Minotaur or indirectly by driving both insane, the house kills both Johnny and Zampanò despite not technically existing. And near the end, Johnny seems pretty convinced that it does exist in some capacity.
• God Is Evil: In his unhinged letter to Karen, Will opines that the House is God. There's frankly little reason to doubt him, given it makes as much sense as any other explanation offered.
• Haunted House: If by "haunted", you mean "terrifying eldritch monstrosity". Intriguingly, it doesn't appear to have always been a house; the explorers from colonial times who explored the land where it would eventually stand never see a building, but they do find the spiral stairs leading to the labyrinth, possibly implying the House proper is just a shell that the labyrinth wears to blend in with the surrounding neighborhood and/or lure in victims. Either way, it being haunted is probably the least frightening potential explanation for its actions.
• Jackass Genie: See Ambiguous Innocence. A possibly interpretation of its behavior is that it's genuinely trying to help the people inside it by giving them what they want, but doesn't understand how humans work. Another is that it understands perfectly and is actively taunting and tormenting the humans by twisting their desires in nightmarish ways. Either way, its "wish granting" is terrifying.
• Laser-Guided Karma: If you think it's malevolent and wants people in it to torment. After Navidson's final expedition, it winds up cordoned off, sealed up, and abandoned to rot, hopefully ensuring that it will have no more victims.
• Living Labyrinth: An especially terrifying and possibly malevolent one that breaks the very laws of physics in the name of tormenting those who dare to enter.
• Mind Screw: Everything about it is mind-breakingly horrific and increasingly nonsensical.
• Misery Builds Character: Those who survive its torture tend to come out the other end stronger. Whether this is intentional on the part of the House or not is up for debate.
• Mysterious Past: Its origins are an enigma, unsurprisingly.
• Pet the Dog: Maybe, if you interpret Will's escape from the labyrinth at the climax as the House taking mercy on the Navidsons for some reason. Even more ambiguously, while it's seemingly hostile to humans, that hostility doesn't extend to animals given that the Navidson's pets don't even acknowledge the labyrinth and just end up safely outside if they go in it.
• Time Abyss: It might very well be older than the solar system. At the very least, its labyrinth has existed since colonial times, if the De La Warr account Johnny finds is to be believed.
• Villainous Breakdown: After Holloway's disastrous expedition, the House freaks the fuck out and begins actively attacking the Navidsons and their friends, killing Tom and prompting everyone to frantically escape. Why it does this is unexplained, like everything else about it.
• World Tree: The novel repeatedly hints at the House having some kind of connection to Yggdrasil, the world-linking tree of Norse mythology. Whether this is intended as an explanation of its nature or just yet another Mind Screw is unclear.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Maybe. Zampanò speculates that the House alters its maze based on the desires and thoughts of its inhabitants, noting that Holloway (who wanted an adventure) got a much longer and more complex labyrinth than Will (who just wanted to find what he needed and get out).

The Navidsons

The main characters of The Navidson Record, a supposedly average family made up of the Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Will Navidson, his supermodel partner Karen Green, their two children Chad and Daisy, and their pets. The family moves into a new house, hoping to come together. It doesn't go well.

---

• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Will's reasons for returning to the House are astonishingly unclear, to a point that even he doesn't seem sure why he's doing it.
  • Karen may or may not have been molested by her stepfather, which might be what gave her crippling claustrophobia. The evidence given by the book could go either way.
• An Arm and a Leg: Will loses multiple body parts to frostbite in his final delve into the labyrinth. He loses his right hand, his left eye, patches of skin on his face, an ear, and must walk with a crutch for life due to a shattered hip.
• Applicability: In-universe. Karen shows The Navidson Record to numerous experts and analysts in an attempt to make sense of what's happened to her from a non-literal perspective. They're not helpful — the men do little more than hit on her, and the women are too caught up in academic theory to help Karen.
• The Atoner: Will is secretly this for not saving Delial, a starving little girl he took a photo of that made his career.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The Navidsons move into the House seeking to come together as a family. It works. They're terrorized and traumatized to the brink of madness, Will is left crippled and deformed, and innocent people die in the process, but you can't deny that they're together by the end.
• Broken Ace: Karen and Will are both famous and successful in their fields, but at the cost of deep-seated personal issues that haunt them almost as much as the terrifying Haunted House they move into.
• Character Development: From a Dysfunction Junction with deep-seated and hidden problems to a genuinely loving family that has made peace with their pasts and flaws by learning to depend on one another. Will in particular goes from a cold, aloof man struggling to connect with others and prone to being judgmental to a kinder, humbler, more empathetic individual. Of the book's protagonists, they definitely get the happiest ending.
• Claustrophobia: Karen suffers from it, which obviously brings her a lot of grief when it comes to the House.
• Creepy Child: The Navidson children respond in especially unsettling ways to the eldritch nature of the House, such as drawing bizarre pictures of their home represented as a black block surrounded by monsters, earning their parents a visit from a concerned teacher. Up to a point, they're seemingly indifferent to a lot of the House's behavior and oddities. Daisy barely escapes the House's attack on the family and spends the entire time screaming, while Chad generally self-isolates to cope with stressful situations, making him come across as aloof and detached.
  "Daddy, I wanna play hallways!"
• Dysfunction Junction: Beneath their cheery nuclear family image, they're a boiling pot of flaws and dysfunction. Will's cold professionalism interferes with his attempts to connect to others, a problem made worse by untreated PTSD. Karen may or may not be a rape victim and is definitely claustrophobic to a crippling extent. The kids are just plain bizarre. All of them are struggling to bond as a family. This is all before they move into the House.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Karen is so hot that men and women alike tend to flirt with her.
• Heroic Second Wind: As the Navidsons are packing up to leave the House for good, Will hears Karen screaming from inside, as the ceiling and walls begin moving to crush her. Billy Reston points out that, despite suffering from several days of dehydration, exhaustion and the injuries accumulated escaping the labyrinth, Will drops everything and sprints back into the house without regard for his own condition.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Will is a deeply flawed man, but ultimately a good one and the reader's sympathy will definitely remain with him, if only because the House's idea of "punishing" him is so horrific and disproportionate.
• Mask of Sanity: They're introduced as a very normal, well-adjusted family. The events of the story end up exposing them as actually being deeply screwed up, or at least, prone to ignoring their problems rather than facing them.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Will is clearly modeled heavily on real life photojournalist Kevin Carter, who struggled with depression and mental health issues after traumatic experiences he went through while reporting in warzones and ultimately took his own life. Deconstructed, as Johnny points to this trope as evidence that The Navidson Record can't exist, since Will is blatantly less a real person and more a generic fictional stand-in for a celebrity who just so happened to be in the news when Zampanò wrote his thesis. He also points out how sleazy and insensitive this trope is, considering Carter's very real trauma and suicide.
• Only Known By His Nickname: Will is so consistently referred to by his nickname of "Navy" that one may occasionally forget that's not his actual name.
• The Power of Love: Their love for one another is what ultimately saves them from the House and its torment.
• Sanity Slippage: Will becomes increasingly mentally unwell as he becomes obsessed with studying the House. The kids as well, to a lesser but more profoundly unsettling extent; their behavior gets weirder and weirder while the family is in the House.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Will is all but explicitly stated to suffer from untreated PTSD over traumatic experiences he suffered in his time as a photojournalist in war-torn countries. Before that, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for bravery in Vietnam, but returned it to the president — along with a photo of his first kill — in protest of the war.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: Against all odds, they survive the whole ordeal and come together as a family, gaining newfound appreciation for one another and life in general while also confronting their mistakes and pasts to move past them.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The family includes a dog and a cat, but they just kinda disappear from the plot after a bit, with no mention of what happened to them, which gets lampshaded by Zampanò.

Tom Navidson

Will Navidson's fraternal twin brother, a handyman and contented underachiever with no fixed residence or attachments. He and Will were estranged for some time prior to the events of The Navidson Record, but reunite as Tom assists Will in his investigation of the House.

---

• Always Someone Better: Part of why he and Will were estranged. Tom has always felt stuck in his brother's shadow and like he'll never be as respected as Will, and acts the part of the family jokester to compensate for it.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He always wanted to be as respected as his Pulitzer-winning brother and felt under-appreciated. He does eventually gain the respect he craves… at the cost of his life.
• Cowardly Lion: He accompanies Will and Billy for their second incursion into the House, but fear prevents him from descending the Grand Staircase, forcing him to provide radio support instead. After things go sideways, Tom leaves the maze, and Navy assumes he fled in fear. He was actually gathering materials to make a gurney and pully system to lift the explorers to safety.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Beneath his doofy slacker demeanor is a surprisingly badass guy who'll do anything to protect his family and friends.
• Fingore: Tom's last act is to help Daisy escape the attacking House. As Tom reaches for rescue, the House slams the walls on his outstretched arms, mangling his hands and downing Tom long enough for the floor to fall away beneath him.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He gets killed when the House freaks out and starts directly attacking the family, heroically pushing Daisy to safety at the cost of his own life.
• Irony: Despite his desire to be as professionally respected as Will, the story clearly indicates that Tom is the one who's much more personally well-liked amidst the family and their social group.
• Never Found the Body: His corpse is never found, falling into a sinkhole while the House attacks the Navidsons. But given everything the House does, it's almost certain that he's dead once he disappears.
• Nice Guy: Compared to Will's cold professionalism, Tom is significantly more likable and laidback.
• Tempting Fate: He's initially rather skeptical about the House and the danger it poses, being prone to mocking it. In turn, the House seems to palpably hate Tom on a level it doesn't feel towards the rest of the Navidsons, and it's implied his taunting of it might be why it later kills him.
• Vindicated by History: In-Universe. After his death, Will gains a newfound respect for Tom, admitting he was wrong about him being an underachieving loser and that Tom was the true hero of the family all along.

Billy Reston

Will's best friend and an engineering professor at the University of Virginia, rendered paraplegic by a construction site accident near Hyderabad. Engrossed by the mysterious nature of the House, Reston helps the Navidsons in their investigations.

---

• Badass Normal: He's just a normal dude and a paraplegic at that, but he's also a total badass who arguably handles the horrors of the House the best out of everyone.
• Black Best Friend: To Will, though his ethnicity has zero bearing on the story. The two are nearly inseparable, and repeatedly endanger their lives to help one another. He sticks up for Will in more mundane situations, too, calling into a radio show to berate the host for accusing Will of being a lousy husband.
• Crazy-Prepared: When Holloway succumbs to paranoia and starts shooting, Billy immediately returns fire with a concealed handgun before Navidson can even react. He says he brought a gun because the house is "scary".
• Handicapped Badass: Being in a wheelchair does little to stop him from being totally awesome. Case in point, he leaves his chair and crawls down the Grand Staircase without hesitation — something he had every reason to think was a miles-long climb, and which ended up being about nine stories.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Unlike most people who get obsessed with the House, Reston knows to back off from it when it becomes obvious that the "building" is too dangerous to study safely.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Very downplayed in comparison to others, but he has an undeniable fascination with the House. Unlike others who develop similar interest, he's smart enough to abandon the chase when it becomes clear how dangerous the place is. He's prone to calling radio shows to argue with people who make disparaging remarks about the Navidsons and their haunted House.
• Only Sane Man: For the cast of The Navidson Record. He's just about the only one with both a healthy attitude towards the House and no major psychological issues.

Holloway Roberts

An accomplished professional hunter and explorer who is contacted by Reston to lead the explorations in Navidson's place. He proceeds to lead explorations of the labyrinth within the House, which he develops an unhealthy obsession over.

---

• Anti-Hero: Even before going nuts, he's aloof, smug, and hard to get along with.
• Asshole Victim: Averted hard. While he was kind of a jerk, his fate is so horrifying that you'd feel sympathy for his plight.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He agrees to help the Navidsons with their investigation out of a desire for the ultimate adventure that would secure his name in the history books. He gets his wish, unfortunately for him.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Lost in the maze with no hope of rescue and the Minotaur probably closing fast on him, Holloway opts to shoot himself in the heart. Whether he does it to avoid whatever horrific fate the House had in store for him, to deny it the satisfaction of personally killing him, or simply out of pure despair is hard to say.
• Darkness Equals Death: In a horrifically literal sense. After he dies, the shadows in the maze seem to come alive and literally consume him.
• Driven to Suicide: His ultimate fate.
• Evil Counterpart: Evil is a strong word, but he's functionally this to Will, as someone who wants to be in control, and likewise lets an obsession with the House and his potential fame and fortune take over his life. But whereas Will overcomes this through Character Development, Holloway is destroyed by it.
• Face–Heel Turn: From heroic explorer to crazed gunman hunting his own friends.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: For a famous explorer and hunter, he comes off as rather insecure a lot of the time.
• Instant Death Bullet: Repeatedly averted. Billy notices Jed keeps breathing for some time after Holloway reduces his head to slurry, despite being mortally wounded, and Wax survives being shot in the shoulder. When he's Driven to Suicide, he takes nearly three minutes to finally bleed out in the dark.
• Legacy Seeker: His biggest desire is to be famous and well-remembered.
• Meaningful Name: His name is a play on "hallway" and "hollow way", both significant as a man whose inner emptiness ultimately causes him to die ignominiously in an endless labyrinth of hallways.
• Mugging the Monster: His certainty that he can conquer the House and the Minotaur like any other dangerous animal or location he's dealt with over the years gets him into a lot of trouble.
• No Body Left Behind: The cameras seemingly record the darkness and shadows slashing out at Holloway's dead (or dying) body while his emergency flares go out. His gun, camera, and other equipment are relocated intact to the staircase where Navidson finds them, but no trace of Holloway's remains are ever found.
• Sanity Slippage: The House drives him steadily insane, until he snaps completely and starts hunting the other explorers before committing suicide out of despair.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Develops this relationship with Will, as he covets Will's fame and success, while Will resents the idea of "giving up" his discovery to someone else.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): A rather tragic deconstruction and exploration of this trope. His Inferiority Superiority Complex causes him to become obsessed with proving his explorer credentials by conquering the House like he has many mountains before, which naturally leads to nothing but pain as it does not obey the rules of said areas... and actively refuses to do so.

Kirby "Wax" Hook and Jed Leeder

Holloway's assistants, a pair of fellow explorers who take part in the expeditions to explore the labyrinth.

---

• Affectionate Nickname: Hook is usually referred to as "Wax" by his friends.
• Boom, Headshot!: How Jed dies.
• Butt-Monkey: Nothing goes right for poor Jed. Deconstructed, as he doesn't deserve an ounce of it and none of it is funny.
• Fatal Family Photo: Jed is introduced talking about his family, complete with photo. Perhaps predictably, he dies.
• The Lancer: They initially play this role to Holloway, until the House drives him insane and he begins hunting them.
• Sole Survivor: Hook is the only member of the trio to survive the expedition.
• Those Two Guys: Rarely seen apart from one another.

Jenny Antipala

An eccentric architect friend of Karen's who takes part in the investigation via interview.

---

• Cloudcuckoolander: She's a little… special, to say the least.
• Motor Mouth: Karen can barely get a word in edgewise with her.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Played for Laughs. Not only is she immediately accepting of the bizarre nature of the House, she's downright fascinated by the idea of it and tries to figure out how the physics could work.
• No Sense of Personal Space: She's a major cuddlebug, much to Karen's annoyance.
• Skewed Priorities: Her main reaction to learning about the House is to do equations to try and figure out how the physics of it work.

Zampanò's Dissertation

Zampanò

The blind old man who wrote the manuscript examining The Navidson Record. An erratic, capricious, and mysterious person, much about him is unknown.

---

• Animal Lover: He has a lot of cats that he seems to love a lot… cats which may or may not get butchered by the Minotaur as it hunts him down.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: What associates and colleagues of his that Johnny can find all describe him as eccentric at best, erratic in behavior at worst. Though whether that translates into him also being good at what he does is… rather up for debate.
• Cunning Linguist: Played with. He's impressively knowledgeable on a variety of languages, but the way he uses this talent in his writing just adds to his general pretentiousness.
• Deaf Composer: He's a blind film critic. Good luck figuring out how that works.
• Dirty Old Man: Downplayed. He insists on exclusively being read to by attractive young women, but never comes onto them. It's a way for him to try and alleviate some of his crushing loneliness.
• Dying Alone: He dies alone in his apartment one night, due to having no real friends or family.
• Hidden Depths: For all his pompous pretentiousness, a lot of his observations of and insights on The Navidson Record and other subjects are genuinely gripping and fascinating, and he is remarkably well-read even if the way he uses his dense knowledge in the text leaves much to be desired. He's also a very impressive linguist, bordering on being an Omniglot. Further, his personal anecdotes reveal him to be a rather sensitive soul deep down who suffers from debilitating loneliness and emotional woes beneath his self-absorbed academic persona.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As much of an erratic, egotistical nutcase as he seems to be, the few people who do interact with him tend to find him enjoyable enough as company.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Let's just say that, despite the lofty certainty he writes with, Zampanò makes a lot of mistakes, which would be excusable if he acknowledged being an amateur writer but he acts as if he's anything but. One of his amanuenses says he writes like a freshman who'd get a C- at best.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: He might be Johnny's real dad, depending on how you interpret some scattered hints. At the very least, he knew Pelafina.
• Magical Realism: He generally prefers to focus on the characterization and psychology of The Navidson Record, treating the House as just this thing that's happening.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never revealed what precisely killed him. On one hand, the dude was eighty and in poor physical and emotional health; it's far from unbelievable that he simply died of natural causes. On the other hand, it's quite possible (and Johnny believes that) the Minotaur finally got him. If the Minotaur is even real.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: A male example, Played for Drama. One of Zampanò's greatest regrets is never having a son. Or, perhaps, never having a relationship with his son…
• Mysterious Past: Johnny is unable to determine much about Zampanò as a person. The most he's able to find out is that the guy became blind in the 1950s, was approximately eighty when he died, probably had graphomania, and may have been a veteran of the French retreat from Vietnam that sparked the Vietnam War.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's an obvious send-up of Jorge Luis Borges. Notably, he at one point discusses a play that serves as a Perspective Flip of the myth of the Minotaur, portraying the beast as an innocent deformed boy locked away in a cage by a cruel stepfather and slain by vicious brute named Theseus… which is almost an exact description of one of Borges' most famous stories, The House of Asterion.
• Sanity Slippage: He doesn't appear to have been all good in the head, just like pretty much everyone else in the narrative.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: He was seemingly a veteran of the French retreat from Vietnam, and the experience clearly left marks on him. His wartime diary entries are broken rambles.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Zampanò is not the big shot brilliant philosopher and art critic he seems convinced he is. His work has a lot of writing mistakes that even the most amateur of writers wouldn't make, and he regularly gets basic facts wrong that even the most simple of research would've corrected. Not to mention that he's basically just some old guy with no friends, families, or significant colleagues and barely anybody even knows who he is.
• Stylistic Suck: He tries to act the part of an accomplished scholar and Renaissance Man, and tends to fail catastrophically. His writing consists largely of conveying his scanty insights in a tone of smug certainty, out-of-place basic summaries of well-known subjects, attempting to impress with irrelevant precision and lengthy quotations, and in general b.s.-ing for all he's worth, all of which Johnny calls out. And he makes a ton of spelling and formatting errors, or rather, his amanuenses do and he rarely bothers to fix it. At least part of it is attributable to the manuscript Johnny finds being an unfinished rough draft, but most is just Zampanò acting like he's more important than he really is.
• True Art Is Angsty: In-Universe. He's a big downer about the Navidsons' Surprisingly Happy Ending, clearly believing there's more to it and drawing heavy attention to the more bittersweet aspects of the resolution in a way that reeks of this attitude.
• Unreliable Narrator: The first of many in the book. For one thing, the movie he's supposedly reviewing doesn't exist. Or does it?
• The Vietnam Vet: Not of the more famous American war, but of the French retreat.

The Minotaur

The most enigmatic character in the book, one who may not even exist. A terrifying monster associated with shadows and darkness, which bears some relation to the House. Zampanò fears it and goes to great lengths to try and conceal its existence.

---

• Ambiguously Evil: As if it wasn't mysterious enough, even its morality is called into question a few times. While it's superficially a vicious and sadistic beast that kills without mercy, there's some discussion of the Minotaur myth that flips around the perspective and depicts the Minotaur as a misunderstood and deformed child that is murdered by Theseus…
• Ambiguous Situation: Might well be the Anthropomorphic Personification of this trope.
• Beast in the Maze: Its initial base portrayal is being this to the House, as a monster that lurks within its labyrinth to hunt and torment those who dare enter. It quickly escalates into something even more terrifying.
• Dark Is Evil: It's strongly associated with shadows and darkness, while also being a vicious monster that hunts and kills people while driving them to madness.
• The Dragon: Maybe plays this role to the House, depending on your interpretation.
• The Dreaded: Everyone who knows anything about it at all is absolutely terrified of it. Holloway is the sole exception and pays dearly for it.
• Eldritch Abomination: A being of darkness that seems to exist (if it even does) for no reason but to drive people to madness and death.
• Enigmatic Minion: If you thought the House was hard to get a read on, the Minotaur is even more baffling.
• Eviler than Thou: The House is bad enough. The Minotaur is much more directly and actively malicious.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: It's never shown to either the characters or the audience, with the only indication that it even exists being the horrific growl heard inside the labyrinth and the apparent destruction of any object that gets left behind. As a matter of fact, Zampanò seems to have made a concerted effort to erase any evidence of its existence at all. Seeing as its defining aspects, as described by Johnny, are darkness, silence, and the obliteration of meaning, it wouldn't make sense for it to ever appear; it's quite literally the metaphysical incarnation of nothing. Maybe.
• Kick the Dog:
  • It maybe butchers all of Zampanò's cats while hunting him, just For the Evulz. Notable, as the House itself went out of its way to not harm the Navidsons' pets.
  • The way it chews and scratches up and ruins the expedition teams' supply caches serves no practical purpose, especially when you consider the metamorphic nature of the labyrinth. Nor does its constant roaring and growling that echoes through the maze and freaks out anyone who hears it. The Minotaur seems to do both just to fuck with the heads of the humans, assuming it even thinks at all.
• Living Shadow: Maybe its true form or the closest humans can picture to its true form, if you think Holloway's death scene is an actual appearance from it.
• Mind Screw: Hoo boy. The simplest way of putting it is that the Minotaur is like some kind of Schrödinger's Cat character; it simultaneously does and doesn't seem to exist in the narrative and can be included or removed by the reader. It gets way more complicated from there.
• Mythical Motifs: The Minotaur and labyrinth of Greek myth, of course. It is also implicitly compared at points to Nidhogg from Norse mythology to go along with the House's Yggdrasil. Whether either of these go beyond mere comparison or symbolism is another question.
• No Name Given: "The Minotaur" is more an "out of universe" title bestowed on it by Zampanò. The characters in The Navidson Record never give it a name, largely because they have no idea what it even is, and the monster itself obviously never gives a preferred title.
• Schrödinger's Cat: This concept applied to an entire character. The book's narrative functions with or without the inclusion of the Minotaur, with its presence or absence completely altering the possible meaning of things.
• The Scottish Trope: Zampanò goes out of his way to try and avoid invoking it or the darkness in general.
• Sore Loser: If you interpret Holloway's corpse being torn to shreds as the Minotaur being really pissed it didn't get to personally kill him.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Johnny takes on some qualities of the Minotaur — both this one and the mythological one — as the story goes on. Whether it's this trope or something else entirely is as up to interpretation as the rest of the book.

Truant's Journal

Johnny Truant

A deeply troubled tattoo shop apprentice who finds Zampanò's manuscript one night, after which his life begins to decline in truly horrific ways as he attempts to finish and annotate the work.

---

• Anti-Hero: A Nominal Hero at best.
• Broken Bird: He's already one at the start, and becomes even worse as the story takes its toll on him.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The son of a schizophrenic woman who tried to murder him repeatedly as an infant, lost his birth dad in a car accident, drifted from home to home, was partly raised by an abusive foster father who would beat him senseless, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. He's a mess of a human being, but it's surprising when you learn what his childhood was like. Assuming he's telling the truth.
• Dead All Along: One theory about his character is that he actually did die in the incident from his childhood where Pelafina tried to kill him, and the "Johnny" who writes his journal is a character thought up by Zampanò or Pelafina as a representation of what they imagine he could've grown up to be. It makes about as much sense as any other guess.
• Freudian Excuse: A lot of his more unsavory qualities are implied to stem from his awful childhood and the abuse he suffered from all his parental figures.
• The Hedonist: His main goals in life are doing drugs and getting laid. Until it's not enough to dull his paranoid anymore, then he goes sober in an attempt to cleanse his psyche. It doesn't help.
• Hidden Depths: Beneath his sleazy punk demeanor, he shows a surprising amount of knowledge regarding art, poetry, and mathematics. Furthermore, the poetry he personally writes is pretty damn good.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Assuming that the Minotaur isn't real, then the only real source of problems in Johnny's life is his own behavior and flaws that he refuses to ever work on, plus his obsessiveness towards Zampanò's work.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • He engages in some rather disgusting Slut-Shaming directed at the women he and Lude sleep with, imagining up nightmarish and depressing backstories for them and in doing so, insinuating they're only having the sex because they're "broken". Leaving aside the absurdity of someone who claims to get laid as often as him and is in love with a stripper judging people for that sort of thing, he himself is far from well-adjusted.
  • Him declaring that Zampanò had graphomania. Given how obsessive his own writing gets as the story progresses, that's a little rich. Likewise, for all the crap he (rightfully) gives Zampanò about research mistakes, the Editors have to correct Johnny's mistakes quite a few times. In general, really, he's prone to periodically repeating the same screw-ups he gets on Zampanò's case for.
• Kavorka Man: One of the many indications that his account is questionable is how he insists constantly that he bangs tons of hot women despite being a string bean drug addict with massive mental issues, an unlikable personality, and horrific burn scars, all of which combined make it unlikely most women would even speak to him let alone let him touch them. Notably, only one of his romantic or sexual experiences is supported as having happened by the evidence found by the Editors.
• Ladykiller in Love: A serial womanizer, but he falls helplessly in love with Thumper.
• Loving a Shadow: He realizes that this is all he has of Thumper, after he realizes he knows almost nothing about her, and after he realizes he's declined a date with her so he can spend more time with The Navidson Record.
  In spite of her shocking appeal, any longing I should have felt vanished when I saw, and accepted, how little I knew about her. The portrait in my head, no matter how erotic, hardly sufficing.
• Jerkass: He's even a jerk to the reader sometimes!
• Missing Time: As his madness worsens, he begins losing large stretches of time and noticing big gaps in his memory. This first comes to his attention when he walks into work one day and is met with shock by his coworkers, who inform him that they haven't seen him in weeks and that they thought he was either dead or had split town. He claims the lone clock in his apartment either runs slow or fast, and it's all but stated that he's spending every waking hour working on The Navidson Record with no connection to the outside world.
• Only Known By His Nickname: It's casually revealed towards the end that his last name isn't actually "Truant". That's just a nickname. His true last name is never used and he actually specifically asks the Editors not to use it.
• The Paranoiac: Becomes an increasingly worse one as the story goes on, obsessing over the possibility he's being hunted by the Minotaur. Johnny begins suffering panic attacks, which he associates with an impossibly deep, gnawing darkness. He eventually barricades his windows to keep the darkness out, sells all his furniture to measure the walls of his spartan apartment, and installs amateur soundproofing on his walls to muffle an imaginary(?) silence.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Some of the ways he talks about women can get really uncomfortable and cringeworthy. In particular, he slings self-righteous judgment at the women he sleeps with despite having sex with them to begin with.
• The Quincy Punk: Has a lot of stereotypical aspects of punks, but it's surface level at best and he has no real political opinions or care about anything in life beyond his vices and completing Zampanò's book.
• Really Gets Around: According to himself and pretty much nobody else. See Kavorka Man above.
• Sanity Slippage: He already had a lot of problems, but the more he works on Zampanò's dissertation and tries to investigate The Navidson Record, the more unhinged and dysfunctional he becomes.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He talks like a drunk sailor half the time. He even lampshades it at one point, mocking the reader for not noticing that a fabricated section of his journal was fake based on the fact that he doesn't swear in it.
• Stylistic Suck: His writing starts out pretty sensible and coherent, but gets much worse as his Sanity Slippage progresses, becoming prone to long, rambling diatribes that bleed together and getting much sloppier in terms of spelling and formatting, plus his personal journal entries increasingly overtaking both his annotations and Zampanò's paper.
• Tomato in the Mirror: He winds up taking on a number of qualities of the Minotaur as the plot progresses. What these means is up for debate, but isn't with this book?
  • Johnny begins drawing comparisons between his own life and Zampanò's writings, sending him into an existential crisis as he questions the deeper implications.
• Toxic Friend Influence: He and Lude really seem to bring out the worst in each other, when they aren't getting one another in trouble. Except it turns out to maybe be the other way around, as Johnny becomes worse than ever after Lude dies, suggesting they were each others' rocks.
• Uncertain Doom: His final entry insists he's turning his life around, but afterwards the Editors note that he has disappeared and they can't locate him. What became of Johnny is left completely unaddressed. Some interpretations suggest he never even existed to begin with.
• Unreliable Narrator: He openly admits to lying to the reader on several occasions just to fuck with them, contradicts himself more than once, is severely mentally ill, and in general, a lot of his claims are easy to poke holes in.

Lude

Johnny's best friend who initiates the events of the story by directing Truant to Zampanò's apartment.

---

• Book Dumb: He is not very intelligent, to put it mildly.
• Character Death: He gets killed in a motorcycle accident towards the end of the book, which is around when Johnny's life really goes to hell.
• The Hedonist: Lives a life of seemingly nonstop partying, drugs, and sex.
• Meaningful Name: Aside from sounding like "lewd", his name also alludes to quaaludes, another term for meth.
• Only One Name: He's only ever called Lude. If that's even his real name, it's the only one we know of.
• Really Gets Around: According to Johnny, at least, though amusingly, the Editors actually find evidence to support it with Lude, unlike with Johnny's claims of his own bodycount.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: His death is the point where things REALLY begin falling apart for Johnny, and his absence from the remainder of the narrative darkens the already-eerie tone significantly.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He really isn't that important to the plot, but it wouldn't have happened at all if not for him and his exit from it sends Johnny's already crumbling life into the abyss.
• Toxic Friend Influence: He and Johnny seem to get into difficult situations every time they hang out. However, if Johnny's life is a trainwreck with Lude in it, it's worse when he's removed from the equation.

Thumper

A beautiful stripper that Johnny falls in love with.

---

• Did Not Get the Girl: Despite his infatuation with her, things never work out between Johnny and Thumper.
• Ethical Slut: A stripper and all-around sex positive person, plus a truly kind and friendly person.
• Foil: In some ways to Johnny and Lude, as she seems to have a similar "live life to the fullest" attitude to them, but is an actually normal person about it rather than an unhinged moron or Broken Bird.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Well, stripper, but she's still easily the most moral, well-adjusted, and dependable person in Johnny's social group.
• Nice Girl: She's just a really cool person in general by all accounts.
• No Name Given: Thumper is, obviously, just her stage name/nickname. We never learn her real name. Johnny does, but never tells us.
• Only Sane Man: For Johnny's layer of the story, being the only person in his consistent social circle who's got their life together in any sense.

Gdansk Man

A total Jerkass who causes Johnny and Lude a lot of problems. He's Kyrie's physically and emotionally distant boyfriend, who spends most of his time overseas.

---

• Hate Sink: As far as Johnny represents things, he's just a belligerent, vindictive asshole and bully.
• Jerkass: To the point he makes Johnny and Lude look mature and likable in comparison.
• Kick the Dog: His absolutely savage beating of Lude, which ends up having horrible consequences for the latter.
• No Name Given: He's just "Gdansk Man". Evidently, Johnny can't be bothered to learn his name.

Johnnie

A woman Johnny encounters at a bar one night.

---

• Bad People Abuse Animals: She takes a sick Pekingese from a street corner, but prevents Johnny from keeping it as a pet. After dropping Truant off at home, she throws the dog from the car hard enough to mangle its skeleton.
• Plastic Bitch: Her physical appearance is described as "grotesque" and Johnny dwells on the amount of saline and "corpse fat" that holding her body together, saying that while she looked like she could be in her 20's, she was equally likely to be 6,000. She's also vapid, cruel and violent.
• Wasted Beauty: Lude and Johnny are quick to notice her extensive cosmetic surgery, particularly her generous rack. Once he actually speaks to her, Johnny quickly realizes how little she has going on in her head, her lousy conversational skills, and her disconnect from reality. Even before she kills an animal out of pique, Johnny describes her in broadly negative terms, comparing her physique to an apocalyptic storm.

Raymond

Johnny's abusive stepfather, who is dead before the story begins.

---

• Abusive Parents: His treatment of Johnny as a child is, to put it bluntly, disgusting.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: While his trauma from his time as a soldier might be a contributing factor in his abuse of Johnny, the book goes out of its way to make clear it is no excuse for it.
• Hate Sink: Compared to most of the other human antagonists. While there's hints of a Freudian Excuse, it doesn't come close to justifying anything about Raymond's behavior, and he's ultimately just a vindictive, selfish abuser.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: His death from cancer was either just random cancer or the result of a curse placed on him by Pelafina in retaliation for his treatment of Johnny.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: He's a military vet and it's suggested he may have had untreated PTSD.

The Whalestoe Letters

Pelafina Heather Lièvre

A schizophrenic woman remanded to the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute who writes letters to her son, Johnny Truant.

---

• Abusive Parents: Towards Johnny, though not intentionally; she's mentally ill in a way that makes her a danger herself and others, and Johnny was no exception. She does love him, but she also nearly killed him in one of her manic episodes, which led to her incarceration. And she might have succeeded, depending on your interpretation. Notably, the unintended abuse is both physical and emotional; during manic episodes, she's as likely to try and guilt trip and harangue Johnny into helping her as she is to attack him.
• Ax-Crazy: A tragic example. Her schizophrenia manifests in violent ways.
• Color Motif: Johnny associates her with the color purple. Notably, one of the only times in the book that purple text appears is when Johnny recalls a story he heard about a mother trying to care for her brain-damaged child in a hospital before it dies. Make of that what you will.
• Driven to Suicide: What she ultimately does to get out of the Institute.
• Insane Equals Violent: Her schizophrenia takes on some frighteningly violent forms, and she was institutionalized after trying to strangle her infant son to death.
• Madwoman in the Attic: She certainly seems to feel that she's treated like this. The truth is harder to discern, given her unreliable narration. On one hand, she definitely has every reason to be in Whalestoe. On the other, if she's telling the truth about the place being a Bedlam House, then it's really not helping her.
• Mama Bear: Despite the abuse she afflicted on Johnny due to her illness, Pelafina is also ferociously defensive of her son and casts a curse on Raymond for sending him to the hospital, one which may have resulted in the man dying a horrific death via cancer.
• Mood-Swinger: Owing to her mental illness, she can fly from kindly one moment, terrifying the next.
• The Paranoiac: She seems to specifically suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, and it shows in how she becomes more and more paranoid and anxious as her illness gets worse. At the start of the letters, she is on cordial terms with the staff and especially the Old Director, but as she gets older and her treatments fail, she begins seeing the New Director and orderlies as captors or enemies to be outmaneuvered.
• Sanity Slippage: She's already schizophrenic at the start, but over the course of the Whalestoe Letters her condition gradually and severely worsens, as for some reason or another her treatments fail to take.
• Stylistic Suck: Her letters are about as messy and hard to decipher as you'd expect for something written by a schizophrenic gradually losing her mind. That said, her early letters are actually pretty normal - it's only later in her life as her disease progresses and gets worse that her writing starts becoming bizarre and hard to understand as her illness bleeds into her words.
• Unreliable Narrator: The most unreliable one in the entire book, and that's saying something. Her severely unwell and ever-declining mental state mean that basically nothing she says in her letters to Johnny can be taken at face value.

The Directors and Orderlies

The people who run the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. Pelafina has an adversarial relationship with them, convinced that they are abusing her.

---

• Ambiguous Situation: One of the biggest examples in the book. Whether they're actually the monsters that Pelafina portrays them as in her letters or not is impossible to say. On one hand, Pelafina herself certainly seems to think it's real. On the other hand, well, she's schizophrenic. And has motive to lie besides as she clearly wants out of the Institute. Furthermore, the letters they personally send Johnny give no indication that they're anything less than strict professionals… but then again, they'd certainly not admit their criminality, if any, in such letters.
• Bedlam House: According to Pelafina's letters, Whalestoe is this under their watch. Whether or not it's true is another matter.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: If Pelafina's stories of them being villainous are true.
• Brutal Honesty: The New Director is as sympathetic and gentle as he can be in his letters to Johnny about Pelafina's deteriorating condition and later suicide, but also bluntly honest. The former in particular has him state very frankly that he doesn't believe Pelafina will live much longer and that he thinks Johnny should make his peace with her in-person while he still can, and he's proven right as she hangs herself not very long after. It's possible this is why Pelafina takes such a dislike to said New Director; he's too blunt with her and isn't willing to indulge her hallucinations and whims like the Old one did.
• For the Evulz: Pelafina claims the only reason they do the horrific things she claims they do to her is because they want to break her in body and soul.
• Legacy Character: The director of the Institute gets replaced over the course of Pelafina's long stay. The Old Director retires and the New Director is in charge from that point on. This makes things worse with Pelafina's treatment, as for whatever reason she finds the Old Director trustworthy but not the New, and she becomes much more adversarial and paranoid of the staff.
• Nice Guy: Contrary to how Pelafina portrays him, when the New Director personally messages Johnny, he comes off as a perfectly nice man who is sympathetic to both Pelafina's plight and Johnny himself. He also claims that a lot of the staff at the Institute really like Pelafina, in complete contradiction to her accusations towards them in her letters. Whether that's an act or what he's really like — with Pelafina's view of him as a villain a delusion — is unrevealed.
• No Name Given: We never learn the names of any of them, either because Pelafina doesn't bother to mention them in her letters, or her illness means she has trouble remembering.
• Orderlies are Creeps: Pelafina says they are at least, accusing them — in rather nightmarish detail — of constantly raping and torturing her just to try and break her spirit.

Other

The Editors

The good men and women at the Pantheon and Random House publishing houses given the unenviable task of piecing together this book.

---

• The Comically Serious: If they had any reaction to or opinions on the utterly crazed manuscript they are editing, they never show it in their writing, maintaining an air of professionalism that never wavers, even during the most insane parts of the novel.
• Devil's Advocate: As part of their role as neutral, outside editors, they often end up playing this role to Johnny and Zampanò, giving arguments against their assertions. Most notable is the "Contrary Evidence" section of the appendix, in which they lay out their own research into The Navidson Record that goes much more in-depth than Johnny did and contradicts a lot of his findings, to the point of including a film still that may very well come from the movie. They also get interviews and emails with people Zampanò and Johnny claimed to have interacted with, which frequently expose apparent lies that they told in their journals; an email from Hailey that they publish, for example, contradicts Johnny's account of their night and shows her to be significantly different than her depicted.
• Not So Above It All: At one point, they get into an argument in the footnotes over which Bible verse Zampanò quotes.
• Only Sane Man: The only narrators in the book that aren't completely off their rockers.
• Straight Man: Their general role. Compared to all the other narrators, they're succinct, competent, professional, neutral, and generally seem like they're just trying their best to convey this beast to the reader in a semi-coherent way and give all the available facts.
• Stylistic Suck: Inverted. Unlike all the other narrators, their writing is actually competent, as you'd expect given they're sane, uninvolved in the central mystery, and professional editors; they deliver information in the most efficient and succinct manner possible, never make mistakes or engage in weird Painting the Medium antics, and generally make a sincere effort to help the reader discern what's being said.
• Unreliable Narrator: Averted… maybe. Unlike the other narrators, they seem perfectly sane and coherent, as well as a neutral third party unaffected by the madness of the book. But if anything, their attempts to apply a Mind Screwdriver to things just makes it all even more inscrutable.

---