'Forsyth in top form... the master storyteller has lost none of his touch'

A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distresingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent - it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark's feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?

Genre-defying . . . a novel in which something is always lurking just out of sight . . . at once a genuinely scary chiller, a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read.

This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down or persuasively conclude reading. In fact, when you purchase your copy you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly, still trapped in the web of its malicious, beautiful pages.

Superbly inventive . . . a rare debut: genuinely exciting.

There is a core of dark power in House of Leaves and a sense of return to the great dark matter of American literature: the haunted houses of Hawthorne, Poe and Lovecraft . . . one of the few fictions genuinely to approach the nightmarish.

Remarkable . . . genuinely clever and learned, often funny, brilliantly constructed and surprisingly touching . . . a debut of scintillating intelligence and scope.