welcome to the hypermediacy house

Hypermediacy, even at its best, promises no small amount of sensory overload and possibly confusion. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is perhaps the pinnacle of this. Written as a mockery of literary theory and its self-referential nature, the story itself is insanely multilayered and reliant on various technologies. Johnny Truant tells his story, mostly in footnotes (some of which span several pages) of finding the manuscript of the recently deceased Zampano. Zampano's manuscript is a critical analysis of an apparently non-existent film which in turn is a documentary of a photojournalist's family and their exploration of their house which they discover to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. Confused yet? Trust me, you'd be this confused even after your third attempt at the thing.
And then we have the physical presence of the book:

That collage (oh hey- collages!) sticking out is the start of the pages... the book is bigger on the inside than the outside. Among other sundry idiosyncrasies, there are numerous appendices that link back into the pages of the story, an entirely nonsensical index, and the pages that physically mimic the story they tell. So you eventually end up trying to read something that looks like this:

(This means that there are characters trapped in a labyrinth, in case you were wondering.)

Oh, and those colors? The word house is always in blue, and minotaur and passages in strike-thru are in red... the LOC page at the beginning of the book explains this all, but then again it also references editions that do not exist.

To make things even more hypermediated, Danielewski's sister is the musician Poe (you know, one of those 90s chick rockers that Julia Stiles liked in 10 Things I Hate About You¹). She released a companion work, 'Haunted,' which is actually considered to be part of the book itself.
Hey Pretty [note: not entirely family-friendly]


It also might be interesting to note that the first copy of the book - while Danielewski was searching for a publisher who would not refuse to publish it in this complicated form - was online, and read through hyperlinks.

What does this say for current mediacy and our view of it? There have been arguments about whether House of Leaves can be properly called a novel or even a book. Is this an evolution of text that will eventually be absorbed into our idea of the written artistic word or is it a new kind of media altogether?

¹I would like to take an informal poll of how many people watched Heath Ledger singing Frankie Valli on the bleachers after reading this aside.