There are very few things in literature that don't have a creative lineage of precedents...no matter how weird or different a book is, if you read widely enough you will almost always encounter someone else who did something similar.
One of the things I find most exciting about being a writer/reader in this period of history, as we slowly transition from paper texts to digital ones, is the opportunity to create things that the world has genuinely never seen before. As far as I know, this is the first and only gif novel.
One of my favorite descriptions of the novel comes from Dennis Cooper's blog:
"I'm coming off feeling like I've found, through creating a novel out of animated gifs, a whole new world or secret level, in the video game sense, within narrative that makes me wonder anew about what it is and what it can be. I feel like the gif form/material allowed me to do something with fiction that language-based fiction hasn't ever allowed me to do -- that is, absolutely and deeply submerge the story, plot, characters and their development until they become a background."
Besides that introduction, the best way to experience the novel is to just click through and look at it, give it some of your attention.
Reading the novel was such an interesting experience for me because after awhile I realized that, even though it's a novel with hardly any words, I felt that I really was 'reading' it. The sequence of how the gifs are ordered and separated into groups and chapters creates a nebulous but discernible meaning. You start to notice deliberate patterns and structures, and you begin to piece together meaning in a way similar to how you discern and interpret meaning in a sequence of words or sentences. The gif novel is an extremely unique and trippy kind of reading experience, but to me it's still a reading experience. Zac's Haunted House feels like the invention of a new language to me, and I'm excited to see what this new language can say.
