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I'm still not sure what happened here other that it literally transforms the reading experience.

Two simultaneous storylines, one told in footnotes and often taking over the other as the footnotes spill out of control. A man called Zampano wrote a manuscript about a strange house. A house that's way more than just a house. It's all described in great detail, and reads like a piece of found footage that's additionally described and analysed like a piece of academic research. Even reactions, every moment is subject to fictional academic scrutiny and I found it on point as far as academic research can sometimes go! A man called Johnny Truant comments on this narrative. He's pretty wild, engaged in all sorts of danger and lust but the story that unfolds is very dark and towards the end some things within the Zampano story start making perfect sense for Truant.

The whole thing seems to be a product of an unstable mind, a mind riddled with anxiety. But whose? There's so much unreliability, I ended up questioning everything, up to a point of asking - who's actually behind it all?

It's one book you cannot read on a Kindle as the experience would be lost. There is sideways text, upside down text, all reflects the chaos of the moments and I love it. Sometimes extra texts serves to make a noise.

It makes fantastic use of academic discourse, inserts extra material just like Moby Dick, includes poems and fictional references. It makes a great use of the concept of the uncanny and labyrinths and is in general a work covering an astounding breadth of angles. Furthermore, it really is a story that crawls under your skin, and you can't put the book down. The ending is not entirely hopeless though but still brutal. It's all fascinating. I especially love the breadth of styles used.

It's one for rereading, definitely, to see what I missed on the first read, and I'm very happy to put this book on my shelf.