All Hallow's Read

If you haven't yet heard of All Hallow's Read, suggested by Neil Gaiman, it is the new Halloween tradition of gifting another person with a scary book. You can do this on the night of Halloween, or the week itself. He encourages age-appropriate scary, but I remember how much my peers in elementary school loved a good scary story, and I'm thinking there is no age too early for a little bit of scary!

The nice thing about Neil Gaiman instigating such an event is the international buy-in, of course. There is an assigned hashtag in Twitter for people to follow what others are thinking and doing for #allhallowsread, where I've found some fun ideas already. Some people, like Rico on Worlds Without End, look like they are going the traditional route. I've seen quite a few mentions of H.P. Lovecraft, since of course his stories are in the public domain.

What would you gift another person? I really like the idea of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, since that is one book that I read that scared me out of my mind, and I still think about it. Unfortunately for me, with the worst timing ever, I read it when I was house shopping, and I'm completely certain it fed into the most bizarre nightmares I've had in my life. As if house hunting isn't stressful enough, there is nothing like the thought that you might buy one and then discover it is growing on the inside....

House of Leaves is a conglomeration of styles of writing and weird tricks. In other books it might annoy me, but it really adds to the feelings of abandonment and confusion that the people in the story are feeling, and as long as you can wade through the first section, written like a dissertation or a research article, the rest moves a lot more rapidly. Sometimes there might only be one word on a page.

(If you are wondering about the blue.... I can't tell you.)