To be fair, this book isn't a complete waste of time, indeed in places it's genuinely scary and it's frequently entertaining, the use of unusual typography works well; the rapidly decreasing words per page in certain sections helping to create tension and excitement, and in other places making the book work on the level of visual art. As halfway through the book, it loses narrative entirely, descending into endless lists in the footnotes and boxed in mirrored text and distortions, I felt the book was at it's best. If it had concentrated on that it would have been startling. On the other hand the Navidson Project detailed in the book is full of great ideas - there's something genuinely unsettling about the idea of a infinite labyrinth of nothingness appearing in your front room. The ideas are great and there's an awful lot of ambition which should be worth 4 stars in and of itself, however everything else in the book is increadibly tedious.

Danielewski's prose is mostly serviceable but often loses focus becoming tawdry and over blown. His characters are two dimensional and irritating. The treatment of women in the book is shocking. Every female character that turns up first imparts information then has sex with Johnny Truant. Whilst I'm not neccesarily against a book detailing the sexual exploits of the main character, they are unspeakably adolescent encounters, the women are all surgicaly enhanced, shaved and bouncy and spend their time with Truant trying to reenact moves from porn films, all of it feeling rather tawdry. Elsewhere in the book the female protagonist is, of course, an ex model and promiscuous. Truant's love interest is a stripper and his mum - the only non sexual women is mad.

On top of all this Zampano's reflections on the Navidson Project film, which make up the bulk of the book are horribly pompous. It reads like the worst kind of cultural studies onanism. Pretentious, over wrought and increadibly pleased with itself. And worst of all boring. Having to read about characters doing increadibly cliched predictable things once is bad enough having to read 20 different pseudo intellectuals give their theory on why the character did the cliched predictable thing is enough to send one screaming off into madnesss like the characters in the book.

Supposedly it's a satire of this kind of academic nonsense and in fact the book seems to try and side step criticisms with irony. The writer draws attention to some of the worst bits of writing and there's a suggestion that the treatment of women and the characters in general is a show and not to be taken seriously. That doesn't stop it being bad however, the idea that the writer also thought it bad just irritates me more.

Still I'm rather bewildered by the good press this book got. It seems to have got great reviews and perhaps I'm reacting to raised expectations. On the other hand the book gets a great deal of leeway, I feel, for the central premise of the book which seems to have caught peoples imagination. I can't help but feel that this is something that'll fade. Looking back the book arrived shortly before The Blair Witch Project and then after that Big Brother whhich makes the work feel less like a work of innovation and more like a work atuned to the zeitgeist. Making it seem ultimately gimiky. Not that that would matter at all if it were well enough written but it wasn't.

At the end of the day it could have been a great exploitative horror story but certainly not the serious literary work it seems to think it is.