What are the psychological effects of the house on its inhabitants, especially Will Navidson?

In Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern horror novel House of Leaves, the central supernatural entity is the house on Ash Tree Lane, which begins exhibiting bizarre spatial mutations and impossible geometry defying physics. As photographer Will Navidson and his family experience these uncanny alterations, their once idyllic home becomes an antagonist slowly unraveling their sanity through unsettling metaphysical transformations.

Will Navidson's Obsession with the House

For Will, the house's ability to defy reality provokes escalating obsession as he tries fruitlessly to document and make rational sense of its geometric anomalies. His staunch belief in empirical knowledge is profoundly shaken by corridors that curve in impossible ways and rooms that shift maddeningly. Will's need for order is thwarted, consuming him entirely.

The House as a Manipulative Antagonist

The terror of the familiar home becoming unknowable gnaws at Will's psyche, causing him to neglect family and spiral into self-destructive fixation on navigating the labyrinthine interior endlessly multiplying around him. The house manipulates Will's innate scientific curiosity, as if possessed of a sinister agency operating through subversions of space itself.

The House's Role in Distorting Reality

Danielewski portrays the Ash Tree Lane house as more than just a passive setting, but rather an active, menacing entity that brings about the mental disintegration of those within it through distortions of reality. For Will Navidson in particular, the house becomes an ominous psychological antagonist that attacks certainty and reason by warping understanding of spatial dimensions. Danielewski chillingly depicts domestic space transformed into abstraction as human architecture buckles before an unfathomable, sentient geometry.