Hello readers, I haven’t done a book review in a while, so this will be a two-in-one special, a review of Albert Camus’s classic novella The Stranger and Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Starting with the shorter book, The Stranger is set in 1940’s French Algeria. It follows Meursault, a man with a rather fascinating disposition to the world in the form of a rather extreme emotional detachment towards everything from his mother’s death and his lover’s affection. It’s a captivating read with some of the best last pages I’ve ever read and a classic in the genres of Absurdist and Existentialist literature.

Now on to the behemoth that is House of Leaves. This book is strange; it is described widely as a horror novel, but that is a feeble attempt to explain all the intricacies, tangents, and ergodic text that this ever-shifting prose contains. The basic plot is that a man going by the penname Johnny Truant comes across the unfinished academic essay on a film known as the Navidson Record, where a family realized that their new house doesn’t exactly follow the laws of physics. The book follows roughly three perspectives, Truants’ footnotes which act more as a diary (a rather vulgar one at that) of his life and goings-ons and their deterioration. The analysis of the deceased original author using the penname Zampano that goes into history, physics, philosophy, and myth to try and figure out the Navidson Record; and finally, the Navidson family as they try to figure out how to deal with their abode’s sudden spatial anomalies. An amazing read if you like to be weirded out or if you like long essays on strange stuff.