House of Leaves, a 710-page conundrum and ostensible horror story, is many things in one. It is an Internet home page on steroids, growing into a carefully crafted digital sculpture, and then leaping off-screen in the leaves of a book. Leaves which build a most unusual house.

It is a digital experimentation in type blended with a Derridean embrace of the interactivity of text. It is a publishing experiment become artwork, each page a derivation from the usual formality of fiction; part John Cage, Edgar Allen Poe, Jacques Derrida and William S. Burroughs in cut-up mode. Bret Easton Ellis stated that "One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski's feet choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe." But comparisons aside, House of Leaves is a unique item that should appeal to typographers and theorists alongside high school kids and lovers of a good yarn.

Several things are occurring at once in this book, circling an ominous staircase at the center of a home that embraces a hidden secondary space. On the surface it is a horror story, but deeper down it is the tale of a failing relationship, and a tale about mortality and love. It is also a crazed experiment in typography, at times pushing the limits of readability, while testing the limits of concrete poetry in the age of the Apple MacIntosh. Yet again it is an experiment in cinematic visuality, deliberately mimicking the jerk of the camera. And again it is a test of narrative structure, attempting - successfully - to blend three different narratives - the journal of a blind man - Zampano - critiquing a fictional film made by the main character, with text loaded to the hilt with detailed footnotes alongside the notes of a bright but disturbed young man, Johnny Truant.

Here Danielewski blends, firstly, the trend in scholarly journals (and the ironic referencing of it in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) to over footnote every item; secondly the heavy handed polemic of contemporary film criticism and thirdly, the drive of popular fiction.

To take this even further each element is set in type that refers to its function and narrative relevance; Truant, who brings us this tome, is aptly set in courier. The words of the old man are set in Times and editorial commentary is set in Bookman - book man, get it?

Most recently Danielewski has excerpted a part of House of Leaves in a serrate tome, The Whaestoe Letters. The Letters excerpt and expand upon a narrative section in House comprising letters sent to Johnny Truant from his mother who is wasting away in an asylum. Touching and poignant, the Letters are an indication of the depths that House features.

The levels of investigation seem endless, the reader adrift in the flotsam of experimentation and the adrenaline of central narrative, being constantly tricked.

Danielewski spent ten years on this, his first novel. Sitting in a dark bar on New York's Upper East Side, he exudes the confidence of a 34-year-old whose first novel has become a cult hit.

The cult, of course, began on-line. "It was first serialized on the Internet," says Danielewski. "There's the Web page, there's the technology needed to typeset it. And there was the correspondence. There was an amazing range of people who wrote to me from the site and I think that helped me get through some of the publishing hurdles. The publishers wanted it to be a 300 page trade paperback and I was saying 'No, that's not the way it's going because I know there is this old guy in Norway that's reading this and a cop in the South reading it.' That is where the Internet is very valuable, where you see the direct pay-off, it was a great information-gathering tool.

"But then there is another irony in that we always knew this book could not just exist on the Internet – it is a three dimensional object. On the screen you cannot turn it upside down, you do not have double-sided pages, you can't cross-index with your finger on the dog-eared pages as well as the artwork inside. That I always love. At the same time it was using the Internet to say look how particularly unique this analogue computer we have that is called a book, this codex."

Inevitably House of Leaves has automatically been compared with the work of John Cage and E.E. Cummings. "One of the big questions is always OK, this is Cage, is this E.E. Cummings, is this a form of concrete poetry. It's not. Do I like Cummings? Do I like John Cage? Absolutely. But the main thing is the way this book started was with a series of essays that I wrote for myself about how I could use cinematic grammar in a textual way. My father was a filmmaker and he would bring home 16-mm films and my sister and I would watch and in between film rolls he would grill us about what was going on. 'OK, forget the story, why this long shot? Why this composition? What's the key of the editing? Where is the focus of the frame?' And I became aware of how specific and well documented the grammar of film is by people within the industry and it's completely unknown to the public."