"Spatial Rape": Interleaving House of Leaves withMyHouse.pk3

On March 3 rd , 2023, a forum user by the nickname of Veddge posted a custom-made map of Doom II: Hell on Earth (id Software/Nighttime Studios [1994] 2024) in a DoomWorld thread named "MyHouse.wad"(Veddge 2023).In it, "Steve Nelson" tells the tragic story of "Thomas," his friend, who has taken his own life, and how he has found an old floppy-disk containing a recreation of his friends' parents' house in Doom.After porting the .wadfile to GZDoom, it has been released to the wider community as myhouse.pk3.Deceptively advertised as "1 map: Not much of a challenge and roughly 10 minutes of play time," it is in fact a deviously extensive, intricately modelled map designed to play tricks on the senses, utilising many UDMF features to hide the operations of the map and thereby disorient the player.The documentation of the creative process in the map's Google Drive folder (veddge1987), including its typographical choices, as well as an in-game labyrinth, an endless staircase and a reference to "Navidson Realty" all serve to brand MyHouse as an hommage to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (Zampan 2000).This paper takes this intertextual reference as its departure point and asserts that Veddge has not simply been inspired by the novel, but that the entirety of the map's presentation and its spatial poetics are fundamentally homologous to that of book.