The shelf behind the house
Every house is built out of other houses. These are the books that
drew the floor plan for
On the shelf
- House of Leaves A young family moves into a quiet home and measures it: a quarter-inch wider on the inside than the outside. Then a closet becomes a hallway, the hallway a staircase, and the staircase a labyrinth that has no business existing. Told in nested footnotes, a blind man's lost manuscript, and a stranger slowly coming apart as he reads it, it's a love story and a haunted-house story you read sideways and upside down. The word house is printed in blue on every page — even here — and no one will tell you why. Find it on Amazon
- Ficciones Borges builds whole universes a few pages at a time. A library of hexagonal rooms holds every book that twenty-five symbols can spell — and somewhere on its endless shelves, the one that explains you. A map is drawn so faithfully it ends up covering the empire one-to-one. A man remembers everything, and is crushed by it. If Halloway is a house of riddles, these are its blueprints — twenty-five symbols, twenty-five doors. Find it on Amazon
- The Poetics of Space A philosopher walks slowly through a house and asks what each room does to the dreaming mind — the cellar's fears, the attic's clarity, the secret of a drawer, the refuge of a corner. Bachelard's wager is that a house is not a container but the cradle of imagination, where we rediscover the immense hidden inside the smallest things. Fittingly, the Penguin edition opens with a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski — so the shelf closes its own loop, back to House of Leaves. Find it on Amazon
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Lines the house keeps
Other lines the house keeps coming back to — grouped by the hand that wrote them. Tap the book to find it.
More from the studio
Coming soon — pencilled into the margins:
- City Seekers The real-world hunt Halloway slipped out of — a hidden layer of riddles laid over actual streets and landmarks. A proper door from here is on the way.
- Echoes of the Mesa A very different beast: a story-driven RPG out under open sky instead of inside a house. In the works.
And the house itself keeps growing — Halloway is the first of a planned trilogy, with a basement and an attic still to be opened.
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