Publication Order of The Familiar Books
| One Rainy Day in May | 2015 |
| Into the Forest | 2015 |
| Honeysuckle & Pain | 2016 |
| Hades | 2017 |
| Redwood | 2017 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| House of Leaves | 2000 |
| Only Revolutions | 2006 |
| Tom’s Crossing | 2025 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Whalestoe Letters | 2000 |
| The Fifty Year Sword | 2005 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| The Little Blue Kite | 2019 |
About Mark Z. Danielewski
Mark Z. Danielewski (born in New York City on 5 March 1966) is an American novelist best known for his debut, “House of Leaves” (2000), a horror novel built around a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. His books are known for their unconventional typography and page layout, a style he calls “signiconic”.
He is the son of the Polish film director Tad Danielewski, and his sister is the singer Poe. The family moved often for his father’s film projects, and by the age of ten he had lived in six countries before they settled in Provo, Utah. He graduated from Yale in 1988 with a degree in English literature and took an MFA at the USC School of Cinema-Television in 1993.
“House of Leaves” took ten years to write, during which he worked as a tutor, barista and plumber. Around thirty-two publishers saw it before Pantheon took it on. It won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and gathered a cult following, and his sister’s album “Haunted” draws on it. A companion novella, “The Whalestoe Letters”, appeared the same year. His second novel, “Only Revolutions” (2006), was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novella “The Fifty Year Sword”, a ghost story for adults, was first published in the Netherlands in 2005 and reissued by Pantheon in 2012.
In 2015 he began “The Familiar”, planned as a 27-volume series about a twelve-year-old girl who finds a kitten. Five volumes of about 880 pages each appeared between 2015 and 2017, from “One Rainy Day in May” to “Redwood”. In February 2018 he announced that the series had been paused because the readership did not justify the cost of continuing. “The Little Blue Kite”, an illustrated book that he describes as a children’s book for your younger self, followed in 2019.
His most recent novel is “Tom’s Crossing”, published on 28 October 2025. A western of about 1,200 pages set in Utah in 1982, it follows two friends who set out to save two horses marked for slaughter. It reached the New York Times bestseller list, and The Washington Post named it a best book of the year. Danielewski lives in Los Angeles.
Photo: Emman Montalvan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).