Any horror plot that leaves things open-ended will bother me for years. While I've deeply enjoyed a lot of Mr. King's books, some of them have given me the willies for much longer than I really liked; The Stand was fine, but I once made the mistake of reading Pet Sematary before finals week and lost more sleep than I could afford, and Needful Things and The Shining still make me twitchy a decade after reading them. The lizard-brain says, but what if it comes to get ME now???

House of Leaves delicately straddles the line between fascinating and intolerable for me. I reread it every couple of years. I am never quite sure whether I like it or not, but I keep it around and come back to it. Oddly, if I regard it as an art installation in book form rather than a book, it is much less unsettling. I suppose my formal art training has made me more receptive to unsettling and disturbing concepts presented visually. Or maybe it has something to do with the different ways I process verbal/textual input and visual input.

I've found that I really enjoy Japanese horror games and manga, actually; the psychological aspect of the horror pushes the buttons nicely for me, while the setting is different enough from my everyday surroundings that I'm not looking nervously over my shoulder - it's not happening here. Instead of gore-shock, it also tends to emphasize the concepts of vulnerability and the unknown more heavily than Western horror.

If something terrible happens just out of sight, was it lions? Or something worse? Or nothing at all? The only necessary proof is that something terrible happened, and if you don't quite know what that terrible thing was, it's even scarier.

Please excuse my disjointed rambling. It's late. Early. Whatever.