The Whalestoe Letters: From House of Leaves Book

It's impossible to talk about this without involving House of Leaves, since a good 80% of the material here reprints one of its appendices, and while the letters stand on their own to a certain degree, many of their implications only reach their fullest bloom in the light of the larger work. With that said, one's assessment of the letters depends a whole lot on how one feels about HoL -- I'd put myself on the moderately-obsessed side of the spectrum, having read the thing twice and developed my own master theory for what's going on, though I haven't delved into the full message-board arcana (I'm familiar enough with the book that even though it's been four or five years since I last read it, I recognized almost all of the new material in this collection without having to go back and check).

Even with that substantial tailwind heading into reading the letters, though, I felt like the book's pretty slight -- lengthwise, of course, but also in what it adds to the story presented in the larger book. The new letters and the new introduction slightly flesh out what's already there -- Johnny's mother is very smart, very smothering, and very unstable -- but while they add a new wobble or two to the overall manic-depressive/sane-insane cycles she goes through, there's nothing essentially different or even much richer in the added material. In fact in a few cases the new pieces serve to undermine to overall mimesis of the work -- several of the added letters rely very heavily on the kinds of typographical and graphic design tricks that enliven HoL, but since they're notionally being written by an institutionalized woman on a typewriter, the changes in font size and sideways text are hard to rationalize within the fiction's conceits.

It might be that the better way to read this is as something freestanding -- for someone who doesn't already know HoL, these letters could come off as a novel, compelling picture of a descent into madness. But it's hard for me to approach the book in that way, so I'm not sure whether it winds up succeeding in that task.