To me the book is more an artistic work. One extensive rabbit hole is the footnotes. Careful reading reveals at least one of them that references an obscure but real person, a scholar, who wrote a real work of scholarship that is referenced in the book.

Others have purportedly found embedded messages in the words written in the book since it was written.

All of the phenomena within and around the the House of Leaves transform it into a concept piece that threatens to be endless as it snarls back in and around itself.

I have never read a book with more completely unrealised potential.

Those two portentous-seeming dreams that Bill has were what really unsettled me about the book.

To me, the horror of the book came fairly early on. Not so much from the events of the story, but the implications of it, and how certain concepts resonated with my own thoughts and experiences in life. More psychological horror than overt, I suppose.

I'm not someone who gets scared easily by fiction, it's been a long time since anything had done it for me, but House of Leaves left me genuinely uncomfortable/looking over my shoulder more than once. The style of the writing definitely contributed to that as well, having to change the way I read it made me feel way more immersed in the material.

I read it when it first came out, and I found it genuinely disturbing, as did most of my friends at the time. Some of us even started having nightmares and paranoid experiences related to the book.

I’ve read it several times, and as I’ve gotten older, I find it not at all scary, in fact it’s a wonderful concept piece that satirizes academia research and media, explores typography, and delves into some interesting psychological realms. I also love the hidden messages, games, and cross-over with the author’s sister, Poe, on her album “Haunted”.

Nah, the book is good but has issues. I loved the story about the actual house but everything else was quite weak for me.

It is one of my favorite books, and it is not horror. Everyone hypes it up so you're expecting Steven King, but it was never scary to me reading it. Extremely beautiful I thought though, and creepy/suspenseful/unsettling/surprising at times, but people set the wrong expectations. You should be safe lol

I found it super boring and all style, no substance.

I always found it to be an amazing satire of an overly-researched thesis paper (the anecdotes are the star of the book!) which was hilarious for me but that's just my opinion

I'm on the fence about it. As mentioned, I feel like there was a lot of potential there that just didn't really get realized. I found the framing story to be weak and annoying, although I did enjoy the story about the actual house.

That book was an imperfect riddle... That's why I loved it. Best mysteries are flawed

If you haven’t found it terrifying with 50 pages to go it isn’t going to happen.

[removed]