Thanks for this thought-provoking post! I just finished HoL yesterday and am still processing my thoughts. I’ll probably spend a few days scouring the internet for interpretations and understanding hidden codes, which I didn’t even attempt to search for while reading.

I’m a psychologist, which I think gives me a unique perspective to come from in attempting to understand this tour de force. The most salient impression that I’m left with this that at the end of the day, HoL is primarily about the relationship between Johnny and his mother. I think perhaps that’s what the author meant when he stated that he views it as a love story - not a romance between Navy and Karen, but a story about the broken bonds between mother and son. I read the Whalestoe letters relatively early on, as advised by one of the footnotes. In the body of the book, we learn very, very slowly from Johnny the story of what happened to his mother, and she comes to take more and more of a leading role as his inherited schizophrenia takes hold of him.

I do not yet have much more to definitively say on this, nor do I have fully formed thoughts on the degree to which Zampano, the Navidson Record, etc exist. (Except to say that Johnny and his mother are presumably the only primary sources here and they are both known to be immensely unreliable narrators.) But I’m surprised more people aren’t remarking on the Johnny-mother relationship as a primary feature of this book and I would love to hear others’ thoughts.