Devil House isn’t what it seems. For one thing it’s hardly a house. Once a diner, once a book store, once a porn shop, once a murder site, now a luxury home.

Devil House the novel also isn’t what it seems. It’s a cyclical analysis of the way we as readers and writers consume true crime. The two dimensional grasp of the case presented to us and how it damages the people and memories bound to the killings.

Devil House is about bad landlords and the housing crisis. It’s about actions and consequences, truths and lies. Fear of the other and the follies of teendom.

As with all Darnielle novels, the story is a broken bone. We get these splintering moments that fuse together into a hard burl. It’s not seamlessly told. It’s at times repetitive and unfair, but also riveting and propulsive. It left me poking at the edges knotted tight beneath its skin.

Did it work for me? Seriously? I don’t know. But I’m still thinking about it a week after I finished so that says a lot.

Like John Darnielle’s previous books, Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester, Devil House addresses the art of narrative—the stories we conjure up to understand our own lives, the inevitable plot holes we can neither ignore nor account for. However, the angle is a little more direct (and meta) in this case because the main character is a true-crime novelist. He actively seeks places and moments ruined lives, whereas Darnielle’s previous characters were generally less deliberate.

Devil House is far from a traditional crime novel, though. (Not that this will surprise loyal readers—the jumps in time, space, and perspective hark back to Universal Harvester.) A kaleidoscopic work of metafiction, the real horror in this book does not stem from the crime or people associated with it: it's more complicated than that. The problem, as Gage Chandler ultimately discovers, is the indifference of the true-crime genre itself.

For background, I will preface this review by saying that I have no personal history with The Mountain Goats. That being said, I really loved this book. I drawn to this by its cover, hoping it would be different than his previous books (which I didn't care for) and something about the plot just clicked into place for me. Gage is writing a book about a crime that took place in his new house- Devil House- years before. Going back and forth between eras with little distinction, we follow the events of the crimes in small town California as Gage researches for his new bestseller. The plot definitely reminded me of fictional true-crime book "Chasing the Boogeyman" by Richard Chizmar that came out last year, but Darnielle makes it entirely his own. I loved this book and would recommend it to people who can handle descriptions of violent crime and nonlinear narratives.

Devil House has a cover reminiscent of those tawdry supernatural bestsellers that clogged bookstores in the '70s and '80s, but what lies inside is deeper and more complex. I'm no fan of True Crime as a genre and this book tackles the ethics and methods true crime writers use to peddle their wares. I haven't read John Darnielle's previous books, but now I definitely need to now, because I loved his writing style.

An interesting story, I particularly liked how the author played with the structure of his novel. Not all of the sections held my attention and I found the story lost momentum around the halfway mark. Still an enjoyable read with interesting characters.

3 for neutral. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish this one at this time, I did try on a couple occasions. I am a quite moody reader, so will definitely update if able to finish at a later time, as I was really looking forward to this one.

I'd been sitting on this one for a bit, mainly because I wasn't sure what to make of the final stretch of the book. In this case, that's probably the highest praise I could give it, because it left me feeling ambivalent while giving me plenty to think about.

Darnielle covers quite a bit of territory in this book. Most simply, he just writes a good, compelling story. His prose, as always, moves smoothly, and the book's very readable.

That alone would be worth the investment, but there are multiple layers to Devil House. Much of the book concerns itself with how we structure narratives, with what gets excluded when we decide what to include. How do we construct a story – even one from truth – that doesn't push people (actual humans) to the margins? How do people become minor characters in their own life stories?

The book also looks at the way narratives intersect. Darnielle constructs his novel based on a symmetrical pattern of time, location, and perspective that connects different storylines (with an fun oddity in the middle that I won't spoil). The structure helps us see how one narrative informs another, without being heavy-handed. Devil House is a postmodern book, but it never feels like one...it never obsesses over its own meta qualities.

Finally (for now, at least), Darnielle tackles true crime as a genre, looking at the form's requirements and restrictions. I'm not a true crime reader, but I still found his protagonists ideas interesting.

All of which means there's a lot going on here, but it's all built into an engaging story. The ending raises as many questions as it answers, allowing for the book to linger the way that only truly good novels do.

Feel like this, of Darnielle's novels, read most like one of his songs. At times it narratively fell apart but hung together emotionally, was intense, deep, lost, moving, and haunted.

There's a moment at nearly the halfway mark of this book where you recognize the author's voice. It's not to say that the earlier going didn't feel like a John Darnielle joint -- but at some point, as I watched a group of teenage misfits breath life into an art project knowing (I thought) how things would end, I felt the ghost of Trace Italian and the strange VHS tapes from his previous FSG novels. I felt the ghosts of all those Mountain Goats songs. It's a testament to John's writing, that he is such a distinctive storyteller. And he's swinging for the fences here.

The book is complex. Complicated. Confusing, even. It has in its sights the interrogation of big concepts like "truth" and "story" and "history" and it does not shy away from the challenge even when it gets knocked off the horse now and then. The book pivots on a strange slight chapter, a riff on (I think) Aubrey's Brief Lives, that is one of the most astounding interjections into a novel I've read in a long long long time. And the end keeps spiraling open in ways that hurt your heart, because you want answers and because you feel the hollow fragile reality of life and how we... well, you all know the Didion line. But there you go.

This will undoubtedly be the most divisive of his novels thus far. May he continue to experiment and bring us all along, open hearts and all.

I’ll be honest and tell you that it took me a minute to get into this one. There are two distinct storylines and the narrative voice tended to change a bit for both. However, since I was definitely involved in both, the book soon captured my attention. I was riveted.

This being my first book by Darnielle, I was unused to his style. However, it the story was both fascinating and chilling.

I’m happy I read this and I definitely want to read more by the author.

*ARC via Publisher

This novel is a staggering work of metafiction that chronicles the perils and pitfalls of the true crime genre. The ending is sure to frustrate just as many people as it enthralls, but I sure loved it!

dnf @30%
I tried to give this book a fair shot because the synopsis sounds right up my alley but I just am not clicking with the dense writing style at all. Our narrator Gage is a true crime writer, and ironically the writing of this book feels like nonfiction - a very “telling instead of showing” type of writing that is not working for me.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (given that this is Darnielle, and given his previous novels), this book is less the horror-driven genre piece that the cover (and, to a lesser extent, blurb) hints at and much more a literary deep-dive into truth, epistemological certainty, subjectivity, and ethics. And while that's interesting to an extent, it's not particularly what I was looking for when I dove into this novel. I also could not enjoy the 'main' character's voice, and while I assume that was at least partly (or even mostly) intentional, it didn't help the reading experience. The cover, though, is absolutely gorgeous, and the premise was still somewhat executed, so all-in-all this was a positive reading experience.

Dynamite cover: ✅
Beautiful writing: ✅
Interesting concept: ✅
Immersive storytelling: ✅

So many positives are to be said about this novel. This book remined me a bit of the recent blockbuster hit Chasing the Boogeyman. I say that because this book blurred the lines between fiction and non-fiction as our MC, Gage, is a true crime writer investigating the mystery surrounding Devil House. A place that was at one time an adult sex shop, that is abandoned by the tenant for continual rent increases, where a teenage employee to that store, Derek, continues to go to read and draw in privacy. The locks haven't been changed and he still knows the alarm code so what's the harm.

He let's his friend, Seth, in on his secret place and as any seventeen year old is he's amazed at the *inventory* that has been left behind. (I should mention that this takes place in the 80's as most teenagers today have porn at their fingertips in the form of cell phones.) Seth, too, is also an artist and they take it upon themselves to make the abandoned shop into a witches lair. Made all the more ominous with the pornographic images blending in with their designs. Something that is sure to scare other people away.

People such as the slum lord landlord and her potential new buyer of the building.

Imagine the horror of this small town community when that landlord and potential buyer are found slain within it's depths. A sword wielded in the most heinous of ways. The Satanic Panic is in full effect.

Devil's House is only a part of this tale. We also have The White Witch of Morro Bay. Gage's first true crime book and most successful book to date. We delve into the details of that case as well and it was absolutely riveting.

Back to my comparison to Chasing the Boogeyman, the reason for this is that so many real life murder cases are sprinkled throughout making it difficult to discern if you are reading fact or fiction. I'm not saying that if you loved that book that you will love this one but it's something to keep on your radar. Though do keep in mind that this doesn't have the memoir feel to it and the details of the case are much more gruesome.

So, yeah, I enjoyed the heck out of this for the most part. However some things did bother me. First, it's being marketed as horror and it is not horror. Second, it has a slow start and took awhile to get it's wheels rolling but once it did I was all in. Third, I didn't understand all the talk of descending from kings and the several chapters in the middle that were about some story about a king that I knew nothing about and I still don't because I skimmed the entire section. That really bucked the momentum. Fourth, the ending was a bit underwhelming. This was a fairly dense book that took some time and investment to get through and it was building, building, building, only to end like that? I was expecting more. Still, this is a valiant effort that is worth the cost of admission. 4 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD for my complimentary copy.

This book is about murder and a true crime author, to an extent, but it is more accurately about what happens when you tell a story that has real consequences for real people; it's about truth, and sensationalism, and voyeurism. It has horrifically graphic violence, which is not my thing at all, but I feel like it would be hard for any reader to come away from this book with an uncomplicated love for true crime.

Devil House is one of those books that's hard to really talk about without spoiling the ending. Every chapter complicates the story further, until the synopsis seems barely what the story is really about at all. It's made me think about the meaning of truth as some pure ideal, and about what the point of telling any story is. I'm a writer of poetry, not prose, but I think this book will still impact how I think about writing moving forward.

I don't like true crime, and if I didn't read everything John Darnielle writes, it's very likely I would never have been interested in this book. Some parts were indeed more gruesome than I would have liked, but overall I'm glad I read it.

It also is of course written well, in the same style as Darnielle's other novels. There's a lot of second-person narration, which I think works well in this context. I wrote down a lot of quotes that I really enjoyed (and the only reason I'm not sharing any is that this review is long enough already).

Mild spoilers ahead, in my central complaint of the book:

Several chapters take place in different time periods, with different narrators and main characters, but nearly all of them are still obviously connected. However, there's one chapter in the middle that is about an entirely different thing, and written in a different style; it almost feels like a different book altogether. You could argue that there are minor things linking it to the rest of the text, but it still feels very odd. And to top it all off, that chapter ends in the middle of a sentence.

Because I was reading an ARC, I genuinely wondered if the chapter simply weren't finished, if no one noticed it wasn't complete before letting readers like me have access to the book. But near the end of the book, a character is reading the manuscript Chandler has for Devil House, and it ends in the middle of a sentence, confusing the reader. This led me to believe that perhaps this odd chapter in the middle of the book is actually meant to end that way, and the reader is supposed to be confused.

I can appreciate this on a stylistic level, and in hindsight I can see how this chapter may relate to the rest of the book. I also have a lot of respect for John Darnielle, and am generally inclined to think any weird stuff he does is genius. But I have to say that that chapter may lose some readers (it's not short and there's no payoff), and may frustrate more. I look forward to reading interviews with Darnielle about this book, in the hopes that he might explain this decision in a way that justifies the negative aspects.

(Again though, I'm still not 100% convinced it was intentional. Maybe it would feel different for a reader with a fully published copy.)

This is a story of a double murder in a small town, told through the lens of a true crime writer who leans very far into verisimilitude when attempting to recapture the scene of the crime. Shifting settings and narrators led to a sense of instability and unreality as the story dipped into other narratives that dwelt on just how many victims there can be in a single incident. The ending is a surprise--and a somewhat abrupt one--but is in keeping with the tone of the rest of the story. I really enjoy John Darnielle's writing and was glad to be able to read this newest book.