Hemmingson, Michael. “What’s beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52.3 (2011): 272-87.

This article analyzes how the novel’s footnotes function as three different narrative voices competing for the reader’s attention: Truant’s, Zampano’s, and the nameless “editors” of the published book. It explains how these voices interact in the novel to create a work of Avant-pop critifiction, and how a full exploration of these footnotes are crucial to fully understanding the statements the novel is making, which includes its own theory and meta-criticism. This article is therefore extremely useful in understanding the ways in which the novel engages the reader and has the reader interact with its references, some of which take the reader to the Internet sphere, and therefore how the online communities dedicated to “de-coding” the novel are perhaps also an inevitable, and necessary, part of the novel itself.

Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34.1 (2006): 107-28.

This article examines the relationship between House of Leaves and the age in which it was born: the digital age at the turn of the millennium. The author discusses how the novel inserts itself into a multimedia network that collectively makes up its narrative, through other texts, the novel’s website, and the musical album recorded by the author’s sister. This reading also details how the novel links itself with the contemporary “discourse network” of the Internet, directly tying itself to the topic of House of Leaves’ online fan base. It therefore is very useful in understanding the novel’s full impact on the reader through a range of multimedia methods, and how each of these gives a new layer to the narrative to create an interactive experience depicting “the digital context from which it emerges” (Pressman, pg. 122).