Devil House is a thrillingly experimental novel from John Darnielle, the lead singer of the Mountain Goats and author of the equally surprising Universal Harvester and Wolf in White Van. Darnielle's protagonist, Gage Chandler, is a true-crime writer looking for the subject of his next book. Hoping for inspiration, Chandler moves into a house where an infamous crime took place and begins his immersive method of investigation. Chandler's occupation allows Darnielle to reflect on the morality and limitations of storytelling, approaching true crime with equal parts fascination and criticism. It also allows Darnielle to push the limits of novelistic structure, as his narrative occasionally slips away from Chandler for lengthy passages that explore the sensational cases that Chandler has rendered into profitable books.
Devil House's slippery narrative is full of the unexpected. While the crimes the book explores have a certain lurid appeal--the case connected to the titular house features a porn store, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and a gruesome pair of murders committed with a sword--the narratives linger much more on the people involved, on the mundane joys and miseries that drove them. Unsurprisingly, these sensitive portraits are a long way from the legends formed in the decades afterward, revealing the way multifaceted tragedies are reshaped into more convenient narratives. As Devil House nimbly moves between Chandler's investigation and the lives of his subjects, Darnielle weaves together an empathetic meditation on the people who live beneath the notice of society--and narrative--until tragedy strikes. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader