the only mystery here is why so many people are dolling out four, five stars for this book.
aside from the obvious parallels to Lost (read: numbers, mysteries native to a foreign space), there is also this rag-tag group of people who behave like insane people, all revolving around the one quickly emerging male 'leader'-- an Every Man, who yarns for a purpose in life. this plot device worked mostly for Lost because that was, foremost, a drama about individuals and their relationships (and, they were stuck on an island ); it fails horribly here, because these characters are hardly individuals--they're paper thin stereotypes-- and hard-to-believe-outside-Hollywood stereotypes, at that, and there are no real relationships. having a few beers in a rooftop doesnt mean a damn, even in a world where your building HASN'T had 26 suicides in the same apartment.
the girls are constantly fetishized and hard to tell apart except for the creepy smiley stepford wife. i never notice this sort of thing, either, so this book must be laying it on pretty thick. then again, i frequently struggled to keep the guys straight, too.
in fact, i found the protagonist, Nate, supremely uninteresting. almost despicable, really. the only character i thought was of any interest was Oskar, the super, the one person these characters seem to actively hate.
worst of it is, the author is clueless about motives and goals of real people, committing every annoying horror movie trope there is. that is, they all act in the most illogical way ever. and when they're not acting illogically, they're acting like they never left highschool. come to think of it, if this whole thing took place in a high school dormitory, with everyone's physical ages brought down, it would make more sense.
if the point of science fiction is exploring ordinary people placed under extraordinary circumstances, this book is pointless.
also, author uses 'prissy' and 'bro' unironically--in the case of the latter, very often.
story movement is tedious. i skipped pages without missing a beat; they tend to be six hundred words telling what could be done in a hundred. what i found was that, reading only the first and last sentence of one paragraph, i could count six paragraphs ahead, to read the first and last sentence there, and still be a part of that Scene/Act. those of nate doing nothing in particular or moaning and daydreaming about nothing in particular, however, were hard to stomach, and had to be skipped entirely.
Peter Clines' '14' only makes me want to read House of Leaves again.