Danielewski’s attention to Xanther and her parents reminds us that “family” is associated with the adjective “familiar.” But as a noun, “familiar” once meant a demon, often in the form of an animal, attending a witch. That meaning seems relevant to the novel’s most unfamiliar set of chapters, where a thief named Jingjing accompanies a cat-owning crone, a mysterious “healer” who also has epilepsy, to the home of a Singapore billionaire with a drug-damaged son. To reinforce the exoticism of his material, Danielewski invents a nearly opaque pidgin English, interspersed with Russian and Chinese printed characters. Two other story lines also have Magus figures: a Mexican animal smuggler named Isandòrno who is called a “brujo,” and an elderly couple, Bobby and Cas, who live off the grid in Marfa, Tex., to evade discovery of their “Orb,” which seems to be a computer program that can predict the future. Bobby is an alchemist working with asters; Cas is identified as “the wizard” in the author’s notes.

Between the normal and paranormal are three remaining sets of chapters that introduce Los Angeles subcultures: a narrative in urban dialect and Spanish about a gang leader’s contracted murder of a young nerd, a story in primer English about an Armenian taxi driver who assists an Armenian scholar researching the genocide, and the meditations of a detective of Turkish descent investigating a murder. Listening to the radio, Xanther roves through very different stations, each with its own call letters, an analog for the irregular order and simultaneity of Danielewski’s chapters and their identifying fonts and color codes.

The possibly grandiose audacity and heterogeneity of “The Familiar” tantalize. But it’s no stand-alone initial offering of a modest trilogy or tetralogy. If “The Familiar” is really the first of 27 volumes, we’re in the very early stage of exposition and probably shouldn’t expect much plot or many linkages to emerge just yet. Bobby and Cas mention Edward Snowden and appear to be members of a multinational hacking group, and they, along with Xanther and Ozgur the detective, know something about a dismemberment in Chinatown, so the series may develop into a murder mystery with national security implications. But for now we have to be content — or not — with pregnant repetitions, thematic connections and verbal associations. Multiple characters hear a faint “cry for help” none can identify. Xanther responds and saves a cat. The Orbists may be trying to save the world from some data cataclysm. The Armenians are attempting to preserve the oral history of a catastrophe, and the “witch” in Singapore is begged to save the billionaire’s catatonic son.

Danielewski wants to combine his new TV accessibility and his usual visuals to save the tired “old form” of fiction from stodgy obsolescence. He continues to play with typography, but it is less radical and more indexical than in “House of Leaves.” That first novel stacked up every possible interpretation of itself. “The Familiar” hustles onward like Xanther switching stations. Its materials are mostly public, definitely contemporary and studiously multiethnic. Although some chapters employ idiosyncratic vernacular styles, they don’t always manage to defamiliarize, as the Russian Formalists said art must; the novel’s Los Angeles often seems derived from movies and television. Detective Ozgur compares himself to noir gumshoes, and the gang leader, Luther, is very aware of his role and image. These imitations of simulacra of stereotypes may be postmodern to the third power, but in future volumes I’d like to see characters from other settings penetrate and disrupt Danielewski’s familiar Los Angeles. He has said serial publication will give him the opportunity to adjust his project according to reader feedback. This reader’s advice: Do less with Xanther and more with the Orbists, whose interests are explicitly intellectual and technological, the strengths of “House of Leaves.”

Of course, unless Danielewski has discovered the alchemists’ secret elixir of life, he can’t spend the decade that went into “House of Leaves” on any one volume of a serial. His crowded and inventive pilot show has me curious about his characters’ futures and how he will connect them. It’s difficult to evaluate a work barely in progress, but I’m definitely in for Volume 2. If Danielewski can complete even part of his grand project, its scale and range and variety could well compete with high-end television series. Alchemists like the fabled Hermes Trismegistus and the self-named Paracelsus produced shelves of volumes. I hope Danielewski can bring off the long-running Magus act of “The Familiar.”