Instead, Devil House is suffused with atmospheric setting and character work and, in one of its least-explained and least-explicit gambits, oblique references to medieval history. With the novel’s mix of Satanic imagery and quasi-Arthurian fantasy, one might expect to to see Darnielle leaning into Dungeons & Dragons or heavy metal, themes he’s explored in previous novels and in his music (Darnielle is singer/songwriter of the band The Mountain Goats). But, as the story unfolds, it gets murkier, bringing in other voices, questioning its own narrative.ĭevil House sits in a strange place, genre-wise: horror-adjacent, full of sympathy and insight, overflowing with cryptic references and narrative culs-de-sac. He clearly takes pride in his “method”-part investigation, part writerly ritual-and the novel initially reads as just an unusually lyrical mystery. Digging into an unsolved double murder from the height of the Satanic Panic in southern California, Chandler buys the house the murders were committed in and begins to work: recreating the scene, conducting local interviews, collecting artifacts. The novel is narrated-mostly-by Gage Chandler, a true crime writer undertaking an ambitious new project.
While I expected bloody twists and turns, the kinds of twists and turns this novel threw at me were intoxicating. The novel is intensely (if circuitously) invested in the condition of narration-who is speaking, why are they speaking, what are they getting out of it? It’s a picture of someone refusing to tell a story they’re already committed to tell, that they’re complicit in and profiting from.
It’s keenly attuned to how people change, how we bring our pasts with us, how the spaces we enter shape us, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes violently. John Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House, is a fascinating hybrid of gothic horror, the true crime format, and something stranger.
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