Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

House of Leaves is my favorite book. Just getting that out of the way. I devoured it hundreds of pages in a sitting when I first read it, and have reread it probably 10 times. Everything works in concert to draw the reader in: a nested hierarchy of narrators, some more reliable than others, an irresistible 'hook' in the form of the anomaly of the house, characters I genuinely cared about even though the book itself told me they didn't exist, and even the crazy footnotes and text formats were there for a purpose that carried the story forward or enhanced the book's universe in some way. The Familiar, on the other hand, strikes me as deliberately hostile to the reader. The characters are almost completely obscured by the writing style. One chapter is written entirely in lowecase, and in some bizarre pidgin dialect peppered with unfamiliar idioms. As a reader, I didn't know if I was supposed to be looking out for character names (which are frustratingly non-standard names like Alstair and Xander for no apparent reason, like every name came from some celebrity's kid) or waiting for characters to be revealed by their behavior. Instead, I finished the chapter with no idea who was being described, what age or sex they were (the author is an expert at The Ambiguous Pronoun Game!), or why I should care either way. The reader has invested a good deal of time reading maybe 100 pages, and the narrator (or narrators?) is unknown, the significance of most that has been uttered is still utterly hidden, the illustrations have nothing to do with anything being described beyond superficial connections, and nothing of consequence has actually happened. Another thing the author loves to do is depict characters having a conversation about things the reader has plainly never encountered before, in a way that does not reveal anything that will stay in the reader's head for later. The first time we meet Cas and Bobby is a perfect example of this. They have about two pages' worth of dialogue that drops maybe 20 names of places, people (nicknames, I guess?), projects, programming or engineering jargon, and basically tries as hard as possible to show that the author knows a little about technology (though capitalizing the "o" in "WOW" as an abbreviation for "World of Warcraft" breaks the illusion rather abruptly for me). Danielewski seems to have lost the ability to describe something in a manner that doesn't involve an ambiguous reference or some circuitous chain of metaphors that are more tiresome than they are clever. The trick with House of Leaves was that the text was clear when it was supposed to be clear, muddled when the narrator was having some kind of episode that would justify that, and the mystery and decoding was left to the subtext--the interplay between narrators, subtle clues left in a footnote or a strikethrough. Here, the text itself is a cipher from start to finish. I want to understand who these people are and what motivates them, but Danielewski wants me to work, hard, to glean this information from what is on the page. I actually found myself looking at the first letter of each word in certain sentences to see if they spelled anything (a device employed sparingly in House of Leave), because the sentences are nearly meaningless otherwise. Flourishes of formatting and font are compelling when there is a narrative foundation upon which to build layers of intricacy. But when the narrative foundation itself IS THE PUZZLE, I just don't want to read it anymore. And I certainly don't want to wait until volume 27 to figure out what the hell any of this means.