1 This is not for you Alison Gibbons, University of Nottingham Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel House of Leaves opens with the extraordinary admonition, ‘This is not for you’ (Danielewski 2000: ix). This caution initially appears to be a strange tactic by the author designed to deter readers. The present chapter investigates the opening to House of Leaves through close textual analysis, which is divided into five parts. The first three consider the linguistic significa- tions of ‘This is not for you’ and their cognitive effect on the reader. Specifically: section one begins a dialogue on the pronoun usage and introduces the cognitive framework of Text World Theory; section two focuses on linguistic negation and its effect on cognitive process and text-world creation; section three focuses on the signification of the second-person pronoun. Subsequently in the fourth part of the chapter, the presentation of the text itself is brought to bear on the analysis. In conclusion, I connect such features to the aesthetic texture of House of Leaves’ opening, suggesting that the inferred meaning(s) and related experience of the opening play an important role in estab- lishing the unsettling atmosphere for the ‘mood’ of the novel. I. Open the door If ‘This is not for you’ is interpreted as a warning to the reader, the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ refers to the novel, the object of the book itself as well as the reading experience it entails. Similarly, the perceptual deictic ‘you’ functions as an address to the reader of the novel. Fludernik states, ‘You, even if it turns out to refer to a fictional protagonist, initially always seems to involve the actual reader’ (1995: 106). Her observation of readers’ initial reaction to you is apposite to Danielewski’s provocative opening, endorsing a reading of it as a direct address.