While it can perhaps be most simply defined as a postmodern horror novel, it is also useful to compare House of Leaves to a number of other works from different genres, since it sets out to do far more than scare its readers. Nevertheless, the novel is genuinely chilling, and as such bears comparison to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, whose The Shining (1977) is perhaps closest to Danielewski's work in its main subject matter and style. In its use of an editor who writes unusually expanded annotations, the novel also recalls Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), and its typographical idiosyncrasies have their origin in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767). The interpretative conundrums posed by House of Leaves, as well as its inclusion of varying stylistic techniques, suggest comparison with that classic of high modernism, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), although it...