The Dionaea House
by Eric Heisserer
Reviewed by John Wright

Eric Heisserer is a Hollywood screenwriter, and as such it should not be surprising that his object in writing is popular or his style, true to life. But it is especially interesting when such a writer takes up a story structured in a way not ordinarily associated with television and movies. The Dionaea House (online at www.dionaea-house.com/) has drawn comparisons from readers to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an absorbing book that deserves commentary in these pages at another time. For now, it is enough to observe that, whereas Danielewski’s book is digressive, heavily footnoted, filled with typographical oddities and all the pseudo-academic analysis that one might expect of a full-blooded metafiction, Heisserer has trimmed down the matter to something perhaps less irregularly and vibrantly written, certainly less diverse, but still absorbing, idiosyncratic and more perfectly formed.

The premise is in part a mathematical inversion of that of House of Leaves. In the latter story, one house gives out to a multitude of spaces not detectable from outside. In the present story, the house is evidently limited but projected to several locations, having in each place the same appearance. Some of the imagery recalls—to my mind at least—the Poltergeist movies, with their scenes of domestic spaces inexplicably transformed.

But Heisserer’s story conforms to the model of its predecessor in that it is told in documents, in an accumulation of websites, blogs and instant messages, which enable the author to create gaps in the narrative and in the reader’s knowledge. To much the same end, Danielewski’s book presented the reader with a drug-addicted, sometimes confused, and not entirely forthcoming narrator, who tells of events following the discovery of a eerie manuscript of uncertain veracity.

The narrator, who shares the author’s name, begins his story with the disappearance of Mark Condry, who corresponded with the narrator while investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of their common friend, Andrew Hughes, who committed suicide after murdering two people in a diner. As Condry’s investigation discloses, Hughes' begins while sitting a house that belongs to his father. Afterward, Hughes is changed, his behavior obsessive and his talk nonsensical. The strangeness of Hughes’ behavior, the inexplicability of the murder that shortly followed, and the feeling of responsibility for his friend’s actions, leads Condry to seek ever further for an explanation. And it is this search that brings him to the Dionaea house, in its several identical and predatory manifestations.

I will not disclose more of the plot or the hyperlinked devices by which it is told. But I can say with a clear conscience that those who may have found Danielewski’s book too much to bear in the elaboration of its devices may find this story more congenial. If it lacks the extreme vividness and energy of Danielewski’s narration, it has more simplicity of style and a more homely verisimilitude, some examples of which follow:

Where do I start? The house is still there. It’s this generic one-story thing, bricks and siding. It must have been built at the same time as the other homes in the neighborhood, but it just looks older. The roof is scarred in places. The driveway hasn’t held up like the others have. Cracks in the pavement. A plank is missing from the side gate.

. . .

A neighbor across the street saw me checking it out. He talked to me for a while, as he watered his shrubs. He hasn’t met the person who lives in the house now, or if anyone is living there really. He remembered Kurt, but not by name, just as the guy who stayed there for a few months. The previous owners – Kurt’s clients – didn’t live there that much longer. They had all sorts of problems with the house. Electrical, heating, that sort of thing. They moved out, left most of their furniture behind, he said. Packed into a big RV one day and just drove off.

[“Correspondence of Mark Condry”]

OMG Linney kept singing that stupid rhyme all night, drove me nuts. I swear if I hear it one more time I'll snap. I had such a hard time with everything tonite. The house got REALLY cold at one point. Made my ear ring, you know that high pitch sound like they use for the test of the emergency broadcast system? Yeah my ear was doing that. I thought it was the computers at first. Did I tell ya about the PC's in the living room? Anyway they are always on. I went over and checked them out. The table is like a spagetti bowl of cables leading off behind furniture or into the wall. Turns out its not them, the ringing was in my ear. But the Ellisons had some sorta monitoring program going....All these numbers were scrolling like mad in a window....the program wasn't anything I recognized, but the file name was like tmptest_attic. I didn't want to get in trouble so I didn't touch them.

[“Adventures in Babysitting”]

The Dionaea House is about the length of a short story but, by its nature, demands navigation online and in one case a certain amount of recursive scrolling on the screen. But it is well-laid out with a varied cast of characters, and has self-consistent premise that is steadily revealed and detailed with the progress of the plot. The story may be faulted on some points. There are several lines that seem as much assurances of the author to himself of the plausibility of his episodes as they are effects for the reader. And in several places, the narration might have stood more description without violating the plausible air of an email or blog post.

But, all in all, we have to confess Dionaea House a very well-made story, eloquent of plot and invention, and a literary creature consummately of its time. It is a gothic tale, an epistolary one not far from the mold of Dracula, but dressed in the images, tone and form of the present. And we think any reader, amenable to the equipment of its presentation and to the terms of fantasy, will find the hour whiled away over this documentarian fiction pleasantly spent.