I've never read House of Leaves, but I've heard a lot about how experimental it is.

I think that when you experiment you're always competing against two things: the need to tell a good story (which is based on certain fundamentals) and the ability to try things that may be better than anything that has come before. Of course, the latter is fairly rare (and "better" can be incremental, not dramatic) but there's still a place to experiment. If nothing else, you learn what not to do.