This was a complicated one. The two star review is based off my immediate gut feeling after I finished it. It's certainly well written and tons of effort went into its creation, which I can dig. But I kinda hated Johnny Truant. His endless boring stories of banging everyone and doing drugs were kind of torturous. Plus, the purple prose and spiraling wordiness of his entries were a drag. I was also frustrated by all the fake scholarship and constant footnotes. Every time I started to get into the story of the house, I had to wade through a few chapters worth of stupid theorizing and microscopic detail analysis of the color of the wife's eyeshadow.

Plus all the typographical clownery. Just because a character is walking down stairs doesn't make it clever to have entire pages resemble them. Come on.

All in all, a very frustrating experience. Also, it was sold to me as one of the great horror stories of the modern age, which had my hopes pretty high. Maybe I just wasn't the target audience for this one. It has been recommended that since I read it in full once, it might be a good idea to revisit and just read the core story, and that it would be much more enjoyable. I may do so.