A printer’s devil just whispered in my ear. He tells me that when printers go to hell, they are forced to turn Mark Z. Danielewski manuscripts into books with nothing more than an old Linotype machine and an X-Acto knife for tools. Sometimes, he adds, they try to use the X-Acto knife on themselves.
Mr. Danielewski, in case you don't know, is the creator of novels that look like a cross between a typographer's nightmare and regurgitated alphabet soup. I have great patience with demanding literature, but when I got to the part in Danielewski's House of Leaves when I need to put a mirror up to the page in order to decipher the text, I was ready to take my recently purchased forty dollar book and use it for kindling. And no, that isn't a verb meaning "to read a book on a Kindle."
But here’s the sad punchline: I can't help admiring this writer’s cussed creativity. Even as I moan and groan at the indignities he heaps upon readers (I'm not worrying about printers anymore), I still find myself caught up in the narrative thread of his books. I still look at the crazy page layouts and find some strange satisfaction in their relentless anarchy. I am, I will admit it, a fan.
There are many narrative threads in Danielewski's new book—at least five, given the five narrators who continually hand-off storytelling responsibility one to another, usually in mid-sentence. But there are literal threads also. The Fifty Year Sword is the first novel I've encountered which singles out "Stitchers" for big font thanks in the acknowledgements —three stitchers to be exact, just like those mythological seamstresses the Three Fates. Say what you will about the storyline of The Fifty Year Sword, at least the physical book holds together and will endure the ravages of time.
If Mark Danielewski didn't serve up such strange-looking books, he might be labeled as a purveyor of horror stories. House of Leaves is one of the scariest books of recent memory, as unsettling as first rate Stephen King or Richard Matheson . It's no coincidence that The Fifty Year Sword was first published in a limited 1,000 copy batch on Halloween Day 2005 and received its first commercial printing in a pumpkin-colored edition released in October 2012. Danielewski's clearly sees this novel as his trick-or-treat offering for All Hallow’s Eve.
The Fifty Year Sword , putting aside for the time being the eccentric layout and shifting narrative voices, is a horror story about a horror story. At a late night party in a large mansion, five children are led off to a remote part of the house, where a storyteller has been hired to entertain them while the adults engage in grown-up fun elsewhere on the premises. But whoever employed this teller of tales failed to do a proper background check. The creepy man shows up with a large black casket—who knows what it holds?— and introduces himself without offering a name, merely a description: "I am a bad man with a very black heart."
Our ominous storyteller then launches into his disturbing tale. Imagine if Edgar Allan Poe had been hired to write and direct Kill Bill, Part One and you will have some idea of the ambiance of his narrative-within-a-narrative. You may find the layout on the page cumbersome. The illustrations may strike you as little more than Rorschach charts. But Danielewski is a first-rate storyteller himself, and I suspect he could keep both adults and children entranced (and probably scared stiff) at the proverbial late night campfire gathering. And, as you can imagine, the late night story in The Fifty Year Sword inevitably leads up to the moment when the fearsome black casket is opened. Just don’t expect me to tell you what’s inside.
This book is not without its faults. Danielewski, a showy fellow if ever there was one, always pushes things a bit too far. Occasionally the text lapses into incoherence. The deliberate misspelling of words is hardly an exciting literary innovation. The shifting narrative voice probably works better in performance—Danielewski has staged this book as a kind of play—than on the page. At times the outrageous marriage of text, layout and illustrations will make you think that this book was devised by Dr. Seuss on acid.
Even so, Danielewski's books shake you up. They force you to adjust to the author's terrain, which almost certainly is not your own, and always show you something you haven't seen before. And how many books rate that praise in our modern jaded age? Above all, Danielewski can spin a yarn with the best of them—or stitch a thread, if you prefer to use his own favorite metaphor. Maybe someday he will be willing to show readers that he can do it without all these eccentric trappings. Until then, you are advised to come to his books equipped with a mirror and a lot of patience. At least they will pay off the effort you expend on them. Well, unless you're a printer.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture. His newest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .