Gothic Elements in House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a contemporary novel that contains the four characteristics of the Gothic novel: architecture, death and decay, family secrets, and deviant sexuality. It also contains some elements of the American Gothic such as mental instability and drugs and alcohol. Architecture by far, plays the greatest role in the book. The house itself causes the events in the book to unfold. Supposedly built in 1720, it has housed approximately
contents of 'The Entertainment' is tied together with the question of the function of the mother and the psychic structures of the Incandenza children. In House of Leaves, Johnny Truant's mother functions as a kind of bWo image, that is, her Whalestoe letters and role in the background serve as an absolute limit to the path of