House of Leaves is an interesting novel in that it has multiple layers of narration - that is, while the reader is reading one thing, the character that the reader is reading about is also reading something, which the reader then learns about.
The first level of narration follows the story of Johnny Truant, the employee of a tattoo shop living in Hollywood. He is the stereotypical dirty-type inner-city person - he uses drugs, has affairs with women, and only appears to care about himself.
One day, Truant and his friend find a piece of literature title The Navidson Record in the room of a man that recently passed away. The man's name was Zampano, and Johnny begins reading the manuscript. Over time, he becomes more and more obsessed with it, and life becomes a blur between fact and fiction.
With his mental and physical health deteriorating, Johnny gets fired from the Tattoo parlor. He travels to Virginia to visit the Ash Tree Lane House that he read about in the manuscript. He now starts to become obsessed with the real-life artifacts from the manuscript, meeting people and touring houses from it.
The next "layer" of the novel is determined through the writing of Zampano read by Johnny. Zamano is determined to be a blind man living in a house alone, and the film for which the manuscript was made does not exist, and likely will never ever exist.
Through the events documented in the manuscript, the reader learns of Will Navidson, who is a photojournalist living with his wife and children in a house on Ash Tree Lane. That house has some odd features about it, but, at first, the Navidson family does not know what they are.
They soon realize that the house appears to be shape-shifting. They move out of the house to New York, but Will says he will go back to investigate. He gets trapped in a hallway of the house, but is eventually rescued. Everyone moves to Vermont and tries to forget about the incident.
The book ends with a rather long aftermath based on the events seen in the footnotes of the manuscript of The Navidson Record.
