My dad casually mentioned the ending of House of Leaves changes meaning if you read it backwards...

I was visiting him last weekend and he pulled his old copy off the shelf, said the whole story flips if you reverse the order of the footnotes... he showed me a few lines and it actually made a creepy kind of sense. Now I'm wondering if any other books have hidden structures like that where the layout or reading direction shifts everything... has anyone else tried reading a book in a weird order and found a totally different story?

2 comments

2 Comments

thomasm4122d ago

Did you ever read that choose your own adventure book where you'd get to a page and it'd say "if you think the door is locked turn to page 57" and then you'd flip around and realize you were reading some totally different plot line the whole time... feels like that kind of trick but way darker.

cora_perez22d ago

Did you ever think those experimental books were just trying too hard to be clever? I used to roll my eyes at stuff like that, honestly, thought it was gimmicky and not worth my time. But then I tried flipping through the pages of S. by Doug Dorst and Abrams, the one with all the handwritten notes and inserts, and I started reading the marginalia before the main text. It completely changed how I saw the story and made me realize there's a whole other conversation hiding between the layers. Makes me wonder how many books have these little traps built in that we just miss.