Cult favourite Mark Z Danielewski has scooped a reported million-dollar advance for the first 10 books in his epic 27-volume new serial novel.

The book, The Familiar, was snapped up by US publisher Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday, with a new instalment to be published every three months from 2014. Pantheon promised that The Familiar would see Danielewski "once again push publishing boundaries": the author's debut title, the horror novel House of Leaves, is an unconventional, multilayered combination of narratives, styles and text, telling, through a series of narrators, the nightmarish story of Will Navidson and his family, who move into a house which begins to subtly change shape around them.

House of Leaves was itself serialised online shortly before its print publication in 1999, by Pantheon and iUniverse.com, who said at the time that the pre-publication serialisation enabled them "to reinvent the historic, Dickensian publishing formula – serialisation of an entire work prior to publication – using a new technology".

Pantheon provided scant detail about the plot of The Familiar, although Danielewski revealed to an interviewer in 2010 that "the story concerns a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten". He told the New York Times this week that he had been influenced by an eclectic combination of books, including Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings and the manga series Lone Wolf and Cub.

His editor, Edward Kastenmeier, told the paper that Pantheon hoped to create a "serial "relationship" with readers of The Familiar. "You await the next one; you want to talk about it," he said. "Everybody will be engaging in the book in roughly the same cycle."

"Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler," said Danielewski. "It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue."

A National Book Award finalist for Only Revolutions, a novel-in-poems about two teenagers who careen across America past and present, Danielewski also has the novella-length ghost story, The Fifty-Year Sword, out from Pantheon next October.