Trivia / House of Leaves

• Colbert Bump: Due to the heavy inspiration it took from the book, the Doom II map My House would quickly draw attention towards House of Leaves. Not only does the former also take place in a house that changes its layout, but the map also has some Shout Outs to the book.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: According to one interview, Danielewski spent ten years writing the thing, spending about ten hours writing each day. Consider the footnotes, alone. Most of them are bogus entries... but the sources are not. So even if the footnote that quotes "New Perspectives Quarterly" isn't a real article, the magazine is real.
• Newbie Boom: Received one in 2023 due to two rather unlikely sources. The first is the experimental horror film Skinamarink, whose premise of two children trapped in a suburban house with an unseen and inscrutable antagonist who torments them via Alien Geometries is very similar to The Navidson Record. The other is the aforementioned My House, an extraordinarily ambitious Doom WAD whose story and level design is heavily indebted to this novel, to the point of featuring a direct Shout-Out in an Easter Egg.
• No Adaptations Allowed: Mark Z. Danielewski has refused all offers of adapting the book, as by necessity it would have to discard the multiple layers of the Nested Story that's told through the footnotes, appendices, and bizarre formatting that make it such a compelling Scrapbook Story. In addition, most offers apparently only envision adapting the most straightforward of the book's elements — Navidson's story — and ignore the fact that it would make far less of an impact without Johnny, Zampanò, and all the other layers. Netflix did want to do an adaptation of the book with Danielewski, but the plans fell through. Danielewski decided to just release the PDF of the planned pilot screenplay.
• Word of God: The colour blue is used in a manner analogous to Chroma Key. Start scratching your heads, folks...
• Write What You Know:
  • Mark Z. Danielewski's Jewish upbringing bleeds into the story in many subtle but important ways. Not only are many of the formatting choices ripped straight from the Talmud, but the house itself has many traits in common with the Jewish conception of God, and the story's dependence on multiple, nested layers of commentary can be likened to midrashim.
  • Johnny's adolescent wanderings throughout Europe were inspired by a similar period in Mark Z. Danielewski's own life. The Pelican Poems in the appendices, implied in the book to have been written by Johnny during this time, are actual poems that Danielewski wrote in honor of strangers he encountered during his travels. It should be noted that despite this, Danielewski has said in interviews that he went well out of his way during writing to make sure that Johnny wasn't a simple Author Avatar for himself and that his experiences with the house were his own.

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