This book actually is a multi-layered story. There is a house in Virginia, in Charlottesville, in Ash Tree Lane. And this house happens to be impossibly bigger on the inside than on the outside. There is a family living in this house, and the presence of this cavern within their house actually disturbs their domestic relationship: the father, mother, and two children all are affected by it.
The father happens to be a photo-journalist, and so when several crews of people start exploring this ever-enlarging cavern of darkness that is accessible by a door seemingly floating from a bare wall, he makes a film out of it. This film is The Navidson Record. Several crews attempt to explore this dark interior. The problem is that the interior constantly changes, and these series of explorations just end in tragedy, with people getting killed, shot, maimed, et cetera. There are theories that the interior of the house changes as a reflection of the mental state of the person currently in the house, but no definitive answer is given for that hypothesis.
Then, there is a manuscript, written by someone named Zampano, which looks like an academic study of the above documentary film. This manuscript contains plenty of intellectual exercises and footnotes. And of course, as expected for academic dissertations, manuscripts, and the like, there's plenty of supporting material.
The final layer is the fact that there is this guy named Johnny Truant, the primary narrator of the book, who is an employee in a tatto parlor, though he definitely isn't the model employee. He's looking for a new apartment, so his friend Lude tells him that there's this flat available in the building he lives in. This flat happens to be the flat of Zampano, who is now dead. And while there, Johnny discovers the academic manuscript.
The overlapping narrative threads create a very massively complex picture, and the text differentiates it with fonts: a particular font is consistently used depending on whether the text pertains to a comment from Johnny, a text written by Zampano, or someone else. Other complexities include the numerous footnotes that makes the reader go all over the place, e.g. turning the page forward isn't the only way to read this book. Sometimes I had to physically turn the book to read. Other times I had to just read the first letter of every word, as the text was written in code.
Needless to say, I haven't read anything like this in a while, and therefore I am exploring this world of ergodic literature for a bit. This book made me look at other examples of such books, and sure enough, I added them to my reading list. And of course, I am giving this book 5 out of 5 stars.
See my other book reviews here.
