The basic premise is wonderfully creepy--a house just slightly larger on the inside than the outside--but is spoiled, I think, by far too much pomo [post-modern], metafictional, wink-wink wankery.   For starters, the frame tale with Johnny whatsisname getting the manuscript from the Borgesian character is just awfully written.   Sophomoric, obnoxious, pretentious, you name it.   Frames are almost always awkward--see "Turn of the Screw"'s, for example--but this one really takes the cake for tooth-grinding badness.   The Navidson narrative is much more compellingly (and maturely) written, even if it too eventually falls apart.   The typographical gimmick of forcing the reader to rotate the book as if she too were in a labyrinth seems a bit silly to me--Thomas Bernhard is able to accomplish this reeling, vertiginous effect much more successfully with syntax alone!--as do the other gimmicks (implying speed of action by printing few words per page, using blue ink for the word "house," etc).   Still, I kind of give him props for attempting it all.   It's an ambitious, if clumsy, first novel, to say the least.   I have to confess I haven't read any of his other works, but I understand that Only Revolutions was shortlisted for a National Book Award.   In the end, a lot of the formal experimentation in his novels strikes me as "packaging" rather than something which contributes meaningfully to the text.   Maybe that isn't quite accurate: the formal stuff contributes to the text, but usually in the vaguest and most superficial ways.   It could just be that I'm getting old (35!!) and am less dazzled by pyrotechnics and more and more seeing the value of restraint.   It's also the case that the experimentalists I admire are flat out better writers than Danielewski.   And it's not just modernists I'm talking about here.   John Barth, love him or hate him, is a gorgeous prose stylist; ditto for Robert Coover and Barthelme.   As for Danielewski's contemporaries, people like Ben Marcus take many of the same sorts of chances but with appreciable results.   I'm still not sure that Danielewski really has anything to say...or is all that intelligent when it comes to saying it.   I hope all this isn't horribly disappointing to hear.   The most damning criticism I can give, really, is that HoL is one of those novels that is vastly more interesting to talk about than actually read.   On the bright side, it seems like for many college kids, HoL is something like a gateway drug to experimental fiction generally.   Assuming that people who read HoL go on to read Borges and Stein and Nabokov and Jonke and so on, well, it can't be all that bad, can it?