5 Books That Fundamentally Changed the Way I Approach My Own Writing

("Surreal Portrait of a Young Writer" by Me Ra Koh)

I'll probably get a little flack for not having any female writers on here, but there weren't a lot of female writers doing experimental work that really jived with me (though I appreciated what Kathy Acker was doing, as well as Amber Sparks and Amelia Gray, all of whom are favorites).

These are the five books that I not only recommend to everyone I meet who wants a recommendation, but that influenced me the most in turning me into the kind of writer I am today. Whether it be the way they told a story or their use of language, these authors turned my literary world upside down and showed me that there was more than a few simple ways to tell a story and nearly a million ways to complicate it beautifully.

Other than "Scorch Atlas" and "Invisible Cities," the words below are from my original reviews of the books, which can be found on my Goodreads profile, which you can find here.

---

"Scorch Atlas" by Blake Butler

I don't recall who got me turned on to Blake Butler's writing, but I'm glad they did. "Scorch Atlas" was both terrifying in its storytelling and eye-opening in the way Butler took language, shook it out, drowned it, wrung it out again, and dried it to create something brand new. This book was easily the most influential of these five in how language could be flipped around and utilized in several different ways while still retaining some heavy meaning.

---

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski

** spoiler alert **

1.) This is one of the thickest books I've ever read.
2.) This is one of the most dense, most frightening, most complex books I've ever read.

Pt.1

Sitting at a lofty 709 pages, the text and formatting make it closer to a 1400 page book. We start off in the perspective of our first narrator (there are multiple), a tattoo artist named Johnny Truant. His friend Lude shows him the apartment of a man who died. In this apartment they find pages upon pages of the former occupant's writing which is essentially what the actual book is; it is the documentation, in a scholarly style (a thesis or doctoral research paper) of a collection of footage called "The Navidson Record." In this apartment, they also find several locks on the door, fingernail scratchings in the floor, and all the windows shut lock-tight with no way of being opened. The former occupant, a man named Zampano, has compiled these pages and notated them with quotes from books that don't exist or cannot be found.

From this point on, we're essentially reading "The Navidson Record" at the same time as Truant. "The Navidson Record" turns out to be the video footage, spliced and edited post-trauma, of a family moving into a house. One day, a door appears in their hallway that wasn't there before and, upon an initial inspection by the father (simply called Navy in most instances), the hallway extends for miles...out through where their backyard should be. It is an impossible situation that logic cannot deconstruct. The halls should not exist since the backyard is still there, but they do. The door should not exist, but it does.

While we get the very academic deconstruction of the video footage (through quotes from books about the incident and scientific explanations of echoes and mythology in regards to labyrinths), we also get to see the slow fracturing of not only the Navidson family, but of our main narrator, Truant, as well. Truant's prose becomes more grandiose and lofty as each page passes. The more he reads of the document, the more he feels like he's "losing it," at one point even imagining that he leaves his apartment only to be hit by a truck, flung on to the top of his car, which is then run into by the same truck, which then spills gas and the possibility of an explosion. In fact, this moment is pure hallucination on his part. These moments come more and more often the deeper we delve into the text.

When Navidson realizes that he has a serious issue with his house, he calls not only his brother (with whom he had a rocky relationship), but also later calls in a team of outdoorsmen who are well-versed in traversing new and unexplored areas - people who have experience in intentionally getting lost. This is where the book starts getting wonky.

At first, I didn't much care for the strange formatting; footnotes ended up sideways on the upper parts of pages, bits of text were turned backwards in their own little boxes in the middle of the page (see above photo) and often contained a litany of names and places that seemed to have no real bearing on either of the two storylines running at that point. But I realized soon that, while the explorers were getting lost in this new cavernous and unexplainable hallway (for 8 DAYS!!!), the text itself was mimicking the kind of shape-changing effect that the hallway had for those involved. Nothing was static, everything was up for grabs. Stability of anything could not be counted on. Everything about these passages was psychological terror and it worked.

There are a few appendices in the back that are referred to in this first section, one of which are the letters Truant's mother sends him from a mental home while he's bouncing around from foster home to foster home. I absolutely cannot ruin my favorite letter, one that I spent an hour decoding by making words and sentences from the first letter of each word in the nonsensical text, but suffice it to say that it wasn't the first time Danielewski uses the text in an incredibly effective way to bring about more terror on the part of the reader in an effort to empathize with the characters. The process of the decoding was slow, agonizing, drawn out, and absolutely powerful. I felt my chest constrict as I realized what the hidden message said.

I have stopped at page 245 to write this because the more I read, the more engrossed I become. The explorers are lost in the cavernous hallway, which has itself produced a downward-spiraling staircase into an unimaginable black depth and more hallways and rooms for them to explore. Navidson and his brother and their friend have gone in after the explorers, knowing that something terrible has happened to one or all of them. I know that if I don't stop now, I will have finished this book by nightfall and I almost want to relish the delicious terror that is building up at a grueling pace.

Despite some very tangential movements in the storyline, both in the academic deconstruction and Truant's interludes and commentary, I'm thoroughly engrossed in this book. It's taken some serious patience to get through some of the initial chapters, but it's absolutely paying off right now. I have zero idea as to how this will end and there are very few clues leading me on. The book is a puzzle to be solved. So much so, in fact, that there is a web forum devoted to picking apart each little clue that Danielewski leaves scattered throughout the book. Like a vision of something truly terrible and unimaginable, I can't take my eyes off it for fear of losing it altogether...

Pt.2

The original trio of explorers haven't been heard from in several days. Will Navidson, his brother Tom, and friend Reston decide to make the trip into the void that lies beyond this door. A dark spiral staircase has been found and seems to be one of the only parts of the void that remains. It stretches up and down and outward, lengthening and shortening one's journey along it, but does not disappear. It is a landmark of sorts in this place of infinite blackness.

Halloway, one of the original trio, has since lost it. He has shot at his companions, who now cower in one of the hundreds of side rooms that seem to appear on a whim. Navidson and Reston finally find them and get them out of the "great hallway" as they've come to call it while the house seems to devour Halloway, leaving no trace of the man. He is gone.

Karen, Navidson's wife, is now preparing to leave the house. She doesn't want to stay there any longer and for good reason. The marriage is fracturing and splintering even more now. The kids have developed strange and unexplainable quirks. As Navidson, his brother and Reston emerge with the the other two explorers (one of whom has died from Halloway's shooting him), the house lashes out. Where before the house had left its actions firmly rooted behind the appearing door and in the hallway beyond, now it has moved out into every other part of the house. The black closes in on the family quickly, turning the house upside down and inside out and taking Navidson's brother with it. Navidson watches his brother, a man he's finally gotten on better terms with after so many years, get swallowed by the house.

Throughout all this are the sexual exploits of Johnny Truant and his friend Lude in the footnotes. But it's not the sexual and drug-fueled escapades that become important so much as it is the truth that becomes imperative to Johnny. He's copying every word of Zampano's original notes down and yet finds his life spiraling every downward. He never leaves his home, he loses his job, he stops eating...he looks like death to most people, but eventually goes on a kind of journey to find the house or any of the people involved in creating this whole storyline.

I hesitate to call this book a love story, though that is indeed what Navidson and Karen's story becomes; it is a reaffirmation of their love for each other once their facades have been completely ripped away over the course of the following months during their separation. Johnny Truant's story, however, feels more like that of a monk, designated to copy the story of the house down in an effort to make sure that it remains vibrant and alive despite all evidence to the contrary.

After all is said and done, there are some photos of collages that have been put together, a part of which is a card of symbols for (I'm assuming) airline pilots or hikers. One of the symbols is a kind of Roman Numberal II, printed on both the inside front and back covers. This symbol means "require medical supplies." Take from that what you will.

The cover is a beautifully embossed maze convalescing into a golden spiral shape with a compass at its center. The cover is just shy of covering the whole book, which some have speculated is a metaphor for the hallway's dimensions in relation to the rest of the house; they do not coexist in the same temporal space. Their measurements will never become equal.

The deeper I get into the storylines, the more I want of the academic deconstruction of "The Navidson Record." By breaking it down from an almost nearly objective viewpoint, Danielewski allows the important moments to become supercharged with emotion without relying on terrible metaphors or bad descriptions. Keeping it academic approaches the terrorizing nature of the house against the family in a way that actually felt more terrifying as a reader.

And as much as I lost my empathy for Truant the longer the book went on, the writing in his sections was phenomenal. It was like watching a slow burn, a junkie dying a physical death, a man completely losing himself over the course of a year or two. The pacing was just right, as was the introspective nature of many of the passages. You could see that the story of the house, real or fictional, was taking its toll on Johnny. This has led some to wonder whether "The Navidson Record" is even real to Johnny. Or whether Zampano even really exists.

---

"The People of Paper" by Salvador Plascencia

Oh metafiction...sometimes you unerringly fail to create something worth reading. Other times, you pop up in books like "The People of Paper" and create a whirlwind of hallucinatory imagery, magical realism-esque elements of the fantastic, and discuss loves lost and won through the battle of man versus the gods. And it is so, so good.

On earth, origami surgeons create paper organs for people in need of transplants; a bed-wetting father watches his wife leave him before moving to California with his daughter; that same father gathers support from the local gang and wages war on Saturn, believing him to be the reason his wife left; a whore made completely of paper who leaves scars on the tongues of her lovers; a baby Nostradamus predicts the future and speaks to children in blacked out messages; lovers come and lovers go, all dancing around each other through the haze of war-time.

In the heavens, Saturn's identity is revealed; the book itself, considered "the war," is funded by a rich, older couple; the author writes because of his own lost love while loving another; Saturn's lover is addicted to the sting of bees.

Plascencia's debut novel (published in 2006), reads like a string of never-ending obituaries. For most of the book, the text is presented in single columns for each character, usually two to a page (but only one column on one page, the left, for Saturn's passages). These are spaced intermittently with longer passages presented in the more standard fashion of formatting with text filling the page in full sentences and paragraphs.

Ultimately, this is a grand soap opera on a massive scale. The movements between the characters on the ground becomes an obvious allegory for the movements between characters in Saturn's world; there is a mirror-imagery that becomes more apparent the deeper one dives into the novel. This in itself becomes a kind of critique of writing (and writers themselves) that I've experienced in the past: how much of ourselves finds itself on the pages of our stories? How do our characters reflect the people of our lives outside of writing?

I worried that this metafictional trope would be used to ill effect by the time I finished the book, but Plascencia does a fantastic job of weaving the two worlds into each other beautifully and with an imagination many would kill to have. Rather than focus on answering the questions of the novel vs. real life, Plascencia digs in and gets into the tiny cracks and rivulets that make up the relationships (no matter how solid or fractured) of the characters introduced throughout these pages. By the time one finishes the book, it's hard to figure if there is a true protagonist or true antagonist relationship between anyone.

While mentioned in small spurts, the use of a whore made of paper who ends up inadvertently leaving cuts on her lovers feels like the main point of the book: as lovers, we leave scars on those we come in contact with. What those people do with those scars and how they feel about us after is entirely up to them.

---

"How They Were Found" by Matt Bell

I've been on a kick recently, trying to find short story collections by little-known authors or those better known on the far outskirts of the literary canon, people pushing beyond just pure narrative and reconfiguring text to suit their own needs. Matt Bell's "How They Were Found" sounded like something I would enjoy immensely, if only for the imagination and possibly not for the writing. As far as I'm concerned, he delivered on all counts.

The majority of the collection (13 stories total) are longer pieces than I'm typically used to reading, but each piece was as engaging, if not more so, than the one that preceded it, which was a nice surprise. Often a collection can lose steam towards the final push if the pieces aren't placed properly, and while I was less enthused by two or three of the stories, the remaining ones made me an instant fan and I will certainly be checking out more of his work.

"The Cartographer's Girl" was a wonderful introduction, utilizing map notations and symbols in an effort to deconstruct a past relationship, of which there is still some mystery left lingering in the air.

"X:
X is the store where he bought the ring he never got to give her.
X is the place where he planned to propose, where he already made the reservation.
X is the speech he rehearsed, that he practiced saying slowly, carefully, so that she would not mishear even a single syllable.
X is nowhere, X is now, X is never mind.
X is everything that ever mattered.
X is all he has left."

"The Receiving Tower" seemed to be after some great "event," putting us in a snowy region with a small battalion of soldiers who were slowly losing their minds and their memories, forgetting not only their names, but their entire histories and how they ended up where they are.

"As I remember it - which is not well - young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We'd find him high in the tower's listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over and over with this fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries."

"His Last Great Gift" was an unbelievably dark piece about 19th-Century minister building a machine that would be the supposed coming of God. More than just a commentary on religion through science fiction tropes, Bell does a great job of explicating the relationships between the members of this religious sect as their lives come into constant contact with each other.

"He says, When God created the world, did he try over and over and over again until he got it right? Are there castaway worlds littering the cosmos, retarded with fire and ice and failed life thrashing away in the clay?
No, there are not.
When God came to save this world, did he impregnate all of Galilee, hoping that one of those seeds would grow up to be a Messiah?
No. What god needs, God makes, and it only takes the once."

But it is "Dredge" that curled my toes back the most out of this entire collection. We follow along with the narrator as he first finds a body in a lake, removes the body, and takes it home with him, taking off on some kind of twisted detective noir tale in suburbia. Truly one of the creepiest things I've read and I appreciated the deep psychological explication of the character as things move along. While a "normal" person may not agree with every action that occurs, there's an understanding that comes by the final page that's disturbingly sweet.

There are several other solid stories here ("An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" was a particularly inspired piece), but these were the ones that really stood out to me. The entire collection as a whole is really solid and even the longer pieces didn't make me feel like I was trudging through them; I was genuinely enjoying them. "How They Were Found" is highly unsettling and highly enjoyable. I'd scoop up everything of his that you can find.

---

"Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino

What can I say about this book? Hell, what can I say about this author? Calvino is a master of the craft, one of the greatest to ever do it. I've read nearly everything he's written and I've loved nearly all of it.

"Invisible Cities" is this jaw-droppingly beautiful collection of fictional conversations between explorer Marco Polo and conqueror Kublai Khan. Marco Polo returns to Khan after each exploratory expedition and describes each city that he visits with language and imagery more beautiful than the city before it, making Khan jealous that he's unable to visit these cities himself. The kicker? Well...you'll have to read it in order to enjoy and appreciate the fun and lovely twist that Calvino adds at the end.