If you're a horror fan that has an appreciation for the Chinese Box approach to story-telling, or maybe just the patience and good eye sight to handle pages and pages of footnotes, twisting/turning endnotes and red on white fonts, then you may appreciate this helluva first novel by the brilliant Mark Danielewski.

Hook: a failed tattoo artist with a mentally unbalanced mother helps clean out a defunct old man's apartment and discovers a trunk containing notes for the beginning of an anthropological critique about a documentary of a house that eats its inhabitants. Whew. That was a long and winding sentence, and so is the plot AND textual layout in this book that is literally designed to eat your brain while the neurons are still firing.

Once I realized what I was getting into, I shut off my phone, locked the tv in the closet, and ate take-out for the entire two weeks it took me to read every word in this book in the order it was meant to be read. When I finished it, I moped around for months looking for ANYTHING as creative and engaging. I also tried to talking to my friends and family about it, and discovered this: a few people loved it, out of those few, two had nightmares for weeks and were creeped out by the shadows in their own bedrooms, and the many who didn't like it later admitted to not exactly reading the whole thing because it was too complicated. In other words, this is no night-table reading.

If you read this book, and love it as much as I do, here's two bits of advice: 1.) give yourself time and space to read it right, and 2.) once you put it back on the shelf or lend it out or trade it or whatever you do with the read and ravished, try graphic novels for a while, or art, or learning a new language or instrument because here's the thing: in comparison, typical linear fiction reads like Dick and Jane.