It operates perfectly on many levels, resulting in a must-read for true crime addicts and experimental fiction fans alike.Spotify tells me that the only song I've listened to more than 'This Year' by the Mountain Goats, ever, is 'Logo Te Pate' from Moana, a song my youngest kid insisted we play every time we drove him to preschool for a full year until his school shut down for the pandemic.

This masterwork of suspense is as careful with its sharp takes as it is with the bread crumbs it slowly drops on the way to its stunning end.

Gage's multilayered narrative of the Devil House murders slowly builds from conjecture to the victims' ventriloquized voices, lending itself well to Darnielle's themes about the artifice of the genre: 'Formalities, when carefully tended, quietly congregate to make form,' Gage notes. Interspliced with Gage's investigation are long excerpts from one of his previous books, The White Witch of Morro Bay, which recounts the gruesome end for two teenage boys who broke into their teacher's apartment. True crime writer Gage Chandler has spent the last five years living in the 'Devil House' in Milpitas, Calif., where he's been working on a book about an unsolved murder that took place there in 1986, during the height of the Satanic Panic. In this riveting metafictional epic, Mountain Goats singer-songwriter Darnielle (Universal Harvester) flays the conventions of true crime to reveal the macabre and ordinary brutality behind sensationalized stories of violence. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected-back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.ĭevil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success-and a movie adaptation-to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. It’s better.” -Dwight Garner, The New York Timesįrom John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. “It’s never quite the book you think it is.

Devil house by john darnielle