here you are.

Shew end of the book.... sorry about typos and spelling errors here, no spell check. LOL a guy at my work spelled correspondence corispodance and blamed it on no spell check, so I figure I can do the same. To the book....

I was bored with the whole samples predate the eart part, too much scientific crap in there for me. I did like the chronological vein of history they demonstrated. That was interesting. Still I didnt really understand the meaning of it. extraterrestrial, interstellar, portal to another dimension? what did all that mean? idk.

The house had taken hold of Navy, reasons to go in? posses it, Tom's death, proper photographs, house is God, delial (the girl in the photo, basically humanity). I'm not sure it mattered. He had to go, for whatever answers he was looking for.

Oh the hallway was gone! But then the whole house just like devoured him. Walls disolve to an inky black. Strange.

Souls of the dead = safety in loss. I didn't get that.

I loved the whole part where everything started going downhill. He was on the bike and "it started getting easier" and even when he turned around to go back up hill he still ended up going downhill. Freaky.

"I have no sense of anything other than myself." very nicely described. The author was very good at describing these odd things in a way we could really understand and put ourselves there with him. I wondered if he was dead, especially when he saw the light and then the film ran out.

Him reading the book "House of Leaves" was a strange twist, what book was that? burning it so that it no longer existed, burning page by page just to keep reading, that was interesting.

Johnny - OMG this part was so confusing but exhilerating to read. Lude's death was a shock and I think it sent Johnny in a tail spin. The whole killing spree surprised me but then I don't think it really happened. I'm not sure if any of Johnny's parts actually happened. I kind of think he was just in an insane institution and created it all. The description of him being deformed and covered in scars, I don't know if THAT was real either.

Was there blood on Johnny in the beginning of the book? I remember something "not all my blood" or something but I went back and couldn't find it.

Those Doctor friends, were they real? Was he in a psych ward? Then when he said he didn't know who wrote the last entries it just made me think, eh none of his stuff is real. Like when he didn't know Lude was dead but then realized it again. It made me think everything was made up by him. He was just so confused and contradictary. Had he been locked away since his mother left? Had they put him away instead of his mother? Did his mother's letters come from the same place he was?

The whole Flagstaff Arizona part reminded me of On the Road, coffee a dime, soup 75 cents, dime slice of bread.

Then the band, "I live at the end of a 5-1/2 minute hallway" what? they have the book? but this is IN the book? Doesn't make sense.

I thought it was significant when he said "I have plenty of time now" because before he kept saying he was near death. I'm not sure why the band and the book gave him time and renewed belief in his own life. Then shit damn again he says none of it's real. wtf?

Darkness is nothingness, Navidson's discovery. Is it really? I'm not sure.

Karen stands at the edge of darkness. She goes in. She brings him out. They marry and live happily ever after. Sort of a lame ending to the Navidson Report.

But here's what I got. OK, I'm going back to the vagina part. See the whole part about Dr. Nowell and the birth of that baby and the mother who talked to him and stayed with him and then said it was time for him to go. I was trying to figure out how that fit. Why was it in the book? Was it relating to Johnny or Navy? Both were taken from their mothers and both had detachment issues. both identified with the absence of their mother.

So here's what was said about the vagina. All of these are quotes or paraphrases:

* Notice only men went into the hallway. Why?

* The feminine void. Men are haunted by that infinate hollow. They lack the hollow uterine cavity. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and even be consumed by it.

* The house is an incarnation of his mother. Navy's dad was a salesman, drunk and violent and disappearing for long periods of time. His mother left for Hollywood. She "wanted to bring down the house" After that she just vanished.

Ok, so when Karen was on the lawn with Navy she was whispering to him the same way the mother whispered to the infant. There seems to be some connection, maybe?

The book said that when Navy's mother left he got used to "a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and lack of any emotional stability." "both he and tom learned to identify with absence. everything was temporary"

I don't know if any of that means anything. Maybe explains why the house called to Navy. Maybe explains why he couldn't escape it.

In general, I wasn't scared by this book. I'm confused as to why people think it's a horror book. It all requires such a stretch of the imagination that it's not threating to me. A book about a serial rapist killer, that's threatening to me because it could happen. This just was soooo far out there, idk it didn't frighten me at all. How about you guys? Did it scare you?

I'm reading through the Exhibits now but there doesn't seem to be much more to the story in there. I guess maybe some more glimmers of why.

Here's a question... how does an author go about writing a story like this? Does he write the Navidson Report first and go back and add Zampano and Johnny? Does he outline the whole thing or does it fall into place as he's writing. I think if I read it a second time I could find a lot of foreshadowing, but one reading there's just so much thrown at the reader it's hard to pick apart what's imporatant and what's just filler. Like all the foot notes, that just seemed extra, like trying to convince the reader this was a real event that took place in our lifetime. When really it wasn't.

Curious to see what you thought.

oh, idk why there are 2 sections for this but lauren, you're not doing a horrible job.

denise: at a really light level i liked the whole samples part. like i didn't need to get into all of the technical stuff but just the mention of it made it interesting. it seems less like bullshit if there's something like that behind it. extraterrestrial, interstellar, portal to another dimension i think were just some ways to try to explain off what no one really understand. because it's easier to blame the aliens than to say you don't know, as crazy as that sounds. i think that's why he had to go in. because we're not happy until we have answers. there's nothing scarier than the unknown. oh god, the black walls and everything scared me. especially since it was in the kids' room with all of the drawings and everything. lude's death made me sad but i'm not really sure if he really died or johnny made it up. yeah, he mentioned the blood at the beginning. when i first read about the doctor friends i thought he finally went off the deep end. ooh i like your theory. that's interesting. i didn't get the whole band thing. hallucination? hmm i kind of was okay with the ending. good for karen. but i still don't really get how she saved him. lol the vagina house theory is definitely reading too much into things. when we started out i was scared. it was a good build with the suspense and i thought there would be all of this scary stuff. but then there wasn't. although i'm still a little spooked out in my house, that was there before the book. probably too many horror movies with just what you said. hmm i have no idea how you would even begin writing this. especially with all the extensive footnotes and everything.

hmm so what do i have to add? i thought he was stupid for going back to the house. sometimes you just need to count your blessings and walk away before the house eats you. but then exploration 5 was interesting because in general the house seemed less hostile. like it was trying to let him in on the secret. so maybe it does adapat to your state of mind because he was always more curious than afraid of it. it was interesting to see the different symptoms they got from it too. i got confused though because i learned in class that echolalia is whatb we normally think of as tourette's (screaming out curses) and then someone told me different.

...my notes say 470 & 471! so let me see what's so important there... oh, it's just that not even the growl was there. i guess that fits in with what i said before about the house being less hostile. and "i gave no sense of anything other than myself." i guess that has to do with his take on the darkness. he's hyperaware of himself which is kind of funny because he's still losing himself.

ha ha "count your blessings and walk away before the house eats you" you should put that as your sigy!

I kind of liked the way he was floating around. It felt peaceful to me. Like dreamy or something. idk. I love the dark. I want it to be pitch dark when I'm in bed. I hate for any crack of light. sometimes I even have to put on my eye cover to make it even darker. so I guess that's why it was relaxing to me when I read that part.

I ended up just skimming the Exhibits cause I'm not all that interested in them. Now that the story is over I think I got enough.

I enjoyed the book but I don't think I'd recommend it. Still say Lovecraft is the scariest shit out there. And maybe because I've read so much of Lovecraft that's why I didn't find this or Haunted scary. sorry to dwell on it, it's just that everyone thought this was gonna be so scary. /that.

I didn't realize this section was so long. I think I'll take notes during study hall and then write it out tomorrow.

(And edit this.)