I've never read House of Leaves, but I've heard a lot about how experimental it is.
I think that when you experiment you're always competing against two things: the need to tell a good story (which is based on certain fundamentals) and the ability to try things that may be better than anything that has come before. Of course, the latter is fairly rare (and "better" can be incremental, not dramatic) but there's still a place to experiment. If nothing else, you learn what not to do.
Exactly. What got me about this one was the three different editions, and how all three had something different added to the story, and lined up with Poe's "Haunted" in different ways, which sounds clever until you realize Danieliewski was just doing the EA model before DLC and $150 collector's editions became the norm. To look back on it now, some scenes just feel so... pretentious, like reading the book while burning the pages he'd already read. It's a beautiful image... as long as you don't see the flaws. There were points I felt that the author was writing these scenes for nothing more than to be clever, you know?
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Yeah, that's one of those things that always sort of rubs me the wrong way.
There's nothing wrong with being clever, but you don't want to be insufferably clever.
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