And so when considering a more thoroughly musical setting for his 2005 novella, The Fifty Year Sword, Mark asked me to provide a complete score and soundscape. He speaks a musician’s language and feels the communicative effect of the unspoken.

It is Mark’s deep appreciation of music that makes our friendship inspired and reciprocal. I have Mark to thank for introducing me to many great books, most memorably those by Roberto Bolaño, with which we have a mutual obsession. Since then, we’ve shared meals and favorite writers. He was convinced I was a counterfeit Christopher O’Riley until tickets did indeed appear with his name on them at the box office, and my image was writ large on the bowl Jumbotrons. Mark and I became friends in the bygone era of MySpace, with my stating my admiration of his work and inviting him to a concert I was playing at the Hollywood Bowl. Luckily, by then, Only Revolutions had already come into the world, a prose poem–road novel with archetypal teen lovers accompanied on their journey by an epic, and epigrammatic, History of the World. My first traversal of House of Leaves hooked me. In the only time I’ve ever seen a bookstore clerk break impassive character, I was applauded and encouraged in my choice of this cult horror novel. I remember browsing at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan-the book’s dark, rune-embossed cover put me in mind of the Necronomicon, a favorite, though entirely imaginary, tome of Lovecraftiana. Danielewski’s work, initially, as with legions of others, through House of Leaves.

Mark z danielewski books