Wow, cool

[simont]

I dreamed that my house had somehow acquired an extra bedroom.

Then I woke up, realised that was silly, got out of bed – and found my house had acquired an extra bedroom, but in a different place.

Then I woke up. Extra points for a dream-within-a-dream! I think I've had one of those before, but never that vividly.

(On the minus side, second time this week I've overslept. I need to get better at using this alarm clock…)

Comments

[simont]

No. I briefly checked Wikipedia to see if I could tell why you mentioned it, but nothing jumped out at me and I didn't feel like ploughing through the entire plot description. (Not least because you might convince me I want to read it for real!)

[zotz]

It's just that early on in the book a house acquires an extra room while the occupiers are away for the weekend. Subsequently it turns out that the house is about an inch and a half longer and wider inside than out. Later, a doorway appears on the inside of an outside wall with a long corridor leading away into the distance.

After that things get a bit odd, so if corridors start appearing move out. Or at least don't investigate.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that does sound good.

[zotz]

That's one part of the book. It's encapsulated in another layer about a study (partly-finished, by a dead Mexican man) of a nonexistent documentary covering the events. In turn, that's within an account of events in the life of a psychologically troubled Californian trying to piece the other two layers together. There's also a strange thread I don't understand about the latter's relationship with his dead mother, copious and multiply-nested footnotes covering all of the above, written in different fonts to indicate the varied authorship, some scored out, including a load of stuff about a minotaur. It's obviously a haunted-house story, but there's a house and no ghost.

If this makes it sound like a strange and infuriating book, that's because it is. It's also an absolute doorstop. Enter at own risk.