Danielewski’s previous novel, Only Revolutions, was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He lives in Los Angeles and spoke to me by phone.

Mark Z. Danielewski: Here is one of those books that just kept murmuring to me in the background. After I published my Only Revolutions—which features two teenagers moving through two hundred years of time—people kept mentioning this 1988 strip by Richard McGuire. I remember filing it away in my mind somewhere. Oh, that’s an interesting idea: being, as a reader, localized in one place and yet accelerating through an enormous amount of time.

Then Here, the book version, was published, and I started to hear from friends. I got a text from Gus Van Sant asking me if I’d read this book. I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me all about it, but I was in the middle of something and promptly forgot the conversation and went about on my merry way. Then I was in the offices of Pantheon, talking with Andy Hughes about various production details—and he started talking about Here.

It was at this moment that I just felt sort of embarrassed—the sense of shame you get when you know you should have read something a long time ago.

So I started to read. And when I realized how rapidly I was moving through it, I purposefully stopped. I understood that I could swallow this whole thing at once, so I decided to only read 10 pages a day. It became this slow, incredibly enjoyable experience for me. In the midst of the enormous amount of stress that goes with not only preparing Volume I [of The Familiar] and finishing Volume II, I found I could lose myself. I could transpose myself into the same place and a different place, and I loved sitting on the couch reading and looking out the window, imagining a kind of similar historical logic to everything around me.

I’d describe the book as looking at a corner of a room and imagining all that took place there, whether it was the year 1553 or 1203 or 500,000 B.C. or 1955 or 2015 or 2315. Inset panes open up inside the room allowing us glimpses into what was happening in that very spot years ago, or years from now. The corner is also materialized by McGuire’s placing it almost always in the center of the spread: Since we usually hold a book so its pages are at an angle, we physically create the room’s walls when we open the book. We create physically that experience of this dead-end corner, and yet through it we not only open up the room of the book itself, but also see through the book into the wider world. And I think Here is very much about that. As much as it materializes opacity, it constantly pushes towards transparency—windows, and mirrors, and panes through which to look.

It’s very much like music in that you can quote music in terms of its melodies or its themes, but in order to really appreciate certain passages you need to experience them in context:

Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire

I’d call this excerpt the arrow passage. It starts with a Native American man hunched behind a large log or rock, getting ready to fire an arrow—presumably at prey. Then over the next few pages, we track this arrow as it flies through space. As it moves from left to right across the page, this arrow is also moving through time and space in a linear fashion. So it’s this unifying idea of directionality, of temporality—but at the same time, there’s a sense of humor about it because, as the arrow floats across the page, we’re also privileged with glimpses at what it looks like in 3,500,000 B.C., or 1870, and 1920, while children play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.