After everyone leaves the hallway, the house starts a type of attack on the owners, forcing everyone to leave. On their mission, Holloway breaks with reality and shoots Wax and Jed, killing the latter. There is a spiral staircase, along with countless rooms.

It grows and grows, with its dimensions constantly shifting.

Will enlists help from explorers Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and Wax Hook to investigate the hallway. At first, the hallway seems only a few feet in length but it grows and sparks in Will the need for investigation. The house’s dimensions continue to shift subtly, and a hallway appears. They discover that the house is slightly bigger on the outside than on the inside. Will Navidson, a character who is a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist, and his partner, Karen Green, a former model, move into the house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia with their children, Chad and Daisy. Through reading the manuscript, we learn about the events of the film, The Navidson Record. He has a series of women come visit him, read to him, and help him transcribe the manuscript. Zampanò is a blind man living alone in an apartment. We learn about Zampanò himself through his writing about the film, which Johnny ultimately determines does not actually exist. One layer down is Zampanò’s manuscript, The Navidson Record. While travelling, Johnny also visits The Whalestoe Institute, the psychiatric hospital where his mother lived, prior to her suicide. While travelling, he encounters a band who are in possession of the manuscript he has been working on they report that the manuscript has been distributed. Eventually, Johnny decides to put the manuscript in storage and goes on a quest to Virginia, to find the house on Ash Tree Lane recorded in the documentary The Navidson Record. Johnny’s physical health deteriorates, and he leaves his apartment less and less, finally getting fired from the tattoo shop. Johnny sometimes sees or experiences “the beast”-a type of animal or being with a threatening, destructive presence. He experiences a series of episodes in which he breaks with reality he thinks events occur then immediately finds out they did not occur, so much so that the reader is often unsure of what is happening in the reality of the novel. He starts compiling a series of footnotes to Zampanò’s text, in which the actions of his own life unfold.

Johnny takes the manuscript home and begins reading it, becoming more and more obsessed with it as time goes on. He and his friend, Lude, discover The Navidson Record in the room of a recently-deceased man named Zampanò. Johnny Truant is a tattoo shop employee living in Hollywood who frequently drinks, uses drugs, and has sex with women.

Book of leaves danielewski