Right before the pandemic, Mark Z. Danielewski — best known for the iconic and experimental 2000 horror novel “House of Leaves” — was inspired to write about Provo, Utah, the place he called home from the age of 10 until he went to college. He didn’t think it would be a long story. But then he was overtaken by the voice.
“I genuinely thought it was going to be a novella,” he says. “I even pictured it with all the design elements that I love. It wasn’t a ghost story. And then suddenly, as I began to write it, the importance of those typographical moves I worked on for 20 years began to just disappear as a voice established itself within me. I describe it as the voice of the woods. It was this light voice, almost from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: ‘Come in here, Mark. Come among the aspens and the birches, and it’ll just be a frolic. It’ll be so easy.’ And then the voice deepened. Suddenly, I was on the side of a gray, rocky, storm-peaked mountain. It was the voice of the mountain. Now I was bewildered and saddled with responsibilities, and I no longer felt alone. And then it was a voice older than the mountain, and I had no choice. That’s what I spent years on.”
The result is “Tom’s Crossing,” a 1200-page western epic with language that sings and screams with the beauty of the western landscape. The plot concerns Kalin March, who plans to free a pair of horses from slaughter if he can escape their rich and temperamental owner. Luckily, he is traveling with the ghost of his best friend, Tom, and Landry, Tom’s younger sister.
It’s a simple premise that spawns an epic — one that Danielewski says is the pinnacle of his work.
“I feel like I was called upon to write that story and the time had come,” he says. “I was at the height of my abilities. I will never write a book as good as this. This is the best book I’ve ever written. I know that it represents a lifetime of work, and to sustain a conversation that has to captivate 1,200 pages in three dimensions. I would wake up just having tracked one word that appeared, let’s say, a dozen times throughout the book, and realized the word had to be changed, and what it would change throughout the whole thing. And that went on and on and on.”
A lengthy editing process accompanied the epic tome, with 10 drafts and a starting manuscript length of 1,800 pages. He says the writing and editing process was exhausting, but it allowed him to reach a unique flow state.
“It’s work, and yet, when you get into this flow, time stops,” Danielewski says. “The time is being set by the work. I have a lot of musician friends, and it’s the same. The clock is the music; they’re not looking at the time. They’re playing the music, and time disappears because they’re now servants to the tempo. That was one of the things that was a kind of innovation: the tempo that was introduced in ‘Tom’s Crossing.’ In some ways, it feels very linear; it feels definitely slow and determined. But at the same time, it begins to leap back and forth as you have these commentators that move in like a Greek chorus, and their lives span well beyond the story. But you look at the work of Christopher Nolan and you look at how a director deals with tempo, the extraordinary skill … His control of the clock and his fluidity with it are remarkable.”
Courtesy of Pantheon
Despite his deep love of the language of film and the cinematic nature of “Tom’s Crossing,” Danielewski believes that, much like “House of Leaves,” the novel is ultimately unable to be adapted to the screen.
“My assessment would be, in the same way that ‘House of Leaves’ is unfilmable because of its blackness, ‘Tom’s Crossing’ is unfilmable because it’s more vivid than anything that you could put on the screen,” he says. “There’s an argument to be had with both of those statements, right? A great director could find a way in through the darkness to film that house. And a great director could achieve a kind of vividness that is not yet available. It could capture what the book was doing.”
As Danielewski embarks on a tour for “Tom’s Crossing,” he’s coming to terms with saying goodbye to the characters, the mountains and the voice that led him there.
“I did a lot of that writing during the pandemic,” he says. “Obviously, that was having its influence. ‘Would I die the next day? Would some tragedy befall my family?’ I was seeing neighbors die, friends die. I was losing friendships. Lots of things were happening. We were in this weird pocket, and it’s the sense of isolation. But writers are built for pandemics. I just would go and write. The real place I’m at now is, I’m still getting over losing these characters. I loved being with Kalin and Tom. I loved being in those mountains. I really miss them, and I will not see them again. This was a voice that was particular to this story. And I don’t really know what’s next.”
Below, watch a video diary Danielewski released in June after he submitted the 10th draft of “Tom’s Crossing,” which dives deeper into his editorial process.
