Devil House begins with a proposal from true crime author Gage Chandler’s editor: a property is for sale in the California town of Milpitas. Abandoned after a spell as a pornographic book and video shop, it subsequently became the site of a little known, possibly occult double murder. The deadly weapon was a sword, and this was 1987: the peak of the satanic panic, when devil worship was supposedly rife and lurking in the grooves of every heavy metal record. Why doesn’t Gage move in, investigate the murders and write his next book?
This sets the stage for the third novel by American musician and author John Darnielle. Like its predecessor, Universal Harvester, Devil House presents as horror but spirals off, with mixed results, in several unexpected directions: it’s a critique of true crime and the impulses that inspire it, a fragmented character study and a metafictional puzzle. This last strand is the most intriguing, landing the novel in an interesting space somewhere between Atonement and the Serial podcast.
Darnielle likes obscurity and the gaps between facts, where rumours swell like mushrooms. Devil House brilliantly captures the pre-internet spread of news in the way the Milpitas murders accumulate weird details, especially in school playgrounds: “I heard they lit the bodies on fire. I heard one guy was covered in oil but he didn’t burn. My friend lives near there, he saw the burning bodies. For real? For real. My brother said there was a lady inside whose right leg was twice as long as her left one, she had to drag herself around by her hands.”
He evokes a powerful sense of place, too. While Universal Harvester gave an eerie portrait of the abyssal loneliness of Iowa corn country, Devil House lands us in a haunted northern California. The paradise of redwoods and vineyards is nowhere to be found, replaced by depopulated zones around highway exits and suburban front doors hiding bleak domestic cruelties.
The book details Gage’s investigation into the killings, which involves imagining himself into the lives of a group of teenage friends who, in the weeks before the murders, transformed the defunct porn shop into their own phantasmagorical kingdom. In these sections the writing is at its most exciting, Gage slipping unexpectedly from the plain, doomy register of true crime into something mock-medieval that conveys the teenagers’ shared dreamworld:
“Angela left her shift at the 7-Eleven one evening and got home late. She told her parents that a high school football team had shown up all at once for Slurpees just before closing, and that she’d had to ring them all up individually before she clocked out. None of this was true. She left at eleven on the dot; from work, she drove her mother’s Toyota to Monster Adult X, where she was granted entrance by the keeper of the key. And in that place she was straight away bade good welcome, which welcome she returned with cheer; and behold, in their hidden glade deep within the forest, far from the reach of stern authority, the noble knights did then hold conference …”
I loved this part of the book. Elsewhere, I struggled. The medieval flourishes are a bold move for a true crime author and one of the questions Devil House seems to pose is: can Gage Chandler write? A recycled detail suggests not: in an extract from his book about the White Witch case we see the mothers of both murder victims receive phone calls while heating beef stew on the stove. The same detail crops up a third time in Gage’s account of the Devil House murders, when another mother takes a call with “a pot of beef stew bubbling on the stove”. It’s exactly the kind of almost definitely fabricated snippet that certain types of narrative nonfiction trade in, calculated to give a scene the tang of reality. Its repetition – a hack move – underscores the bogus nature of Gage’s accounts.
Planted errors like these are fun to uncover. It’s harder to get enjoyment from Gage’s tendency to state the obvious (“Raising a child without a partner is hard enough; if the child in question needs extra care, it’s harder”), and habit of formulating metaphors that cloud more than clarify. Here he describes the effect of violent crimes on small towns: “Communities where these types of crimes occur form bubbles, and the air inside gets humid; when the membrane finally dissolves, people who lived inside emerge with stories they can keep, or tell.”
Is this Darnielle inhabiting a bad writer, or just bad writing? What the metaphor means, or why, outside a first draft, anyone might ever be described as taking a big bite of pizza “like a very hungry person” are mysteries I can’t solve. That is, I suppose, appropriate; the most enjoyable elements of Darnielle’s novel are the blank spaces – maddening, but as true as it gets – left in its accounts of Gage, the White Witch case, and whatever really went down in the Devil House.
• Devil House by John Darnielle is published by Scribe (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
