While Darnielle was writing, he says, a nearby storefront with “Monster XXX” hand-painted on a window cemented the local porn-store setting. After having lived there for five years and re-creating the house to the state it was in when the murders took place, he still can’t write the right story.
But something is different about the Devil House. It’s a good system that allows Chandler to crank out a book every couple of years, keeping publishers happy and giving him enough money to begin the next round of research. He does his best to become as physically close as he can to the scene of the crime and any connected ephemera or locations. The house, once an X-rated video store, later became the scene of gruesome double murder. We first meet Chandler when he is stuck in a suburban house in Milpitas, California, in 2006. The novel is divided into seven mirrored sections that tell at least seven stories that are connected through true-crime writer Gage Chandler. It’s also artful, organized in a chiastic structure with a backward-looping narrative characteristic of many classical texts, but not inaccessible. It will appeal to fans of true crime and horror, but it also serves as a critique of violence-fueled content.
Like Darnielle’s earlier novels, 2014’s Wolf in White Van, which was nominated for a National Book Award for fiction, and 2017’s Universal Harvester, Devil House isn’t easy to categorize. This stuff was primary in my mind while I was writing.” “There was a basketball court there with a backstop that had a big artwork about people who had died in the local neighborhood,” Darnielle says. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.
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