I did find this part to be the weakest because it feels unfinished in its execution. It’s reflected in the two cases and particularly in Part 4 an interlude of an Old English tale about kings that links to the writer’s royalty lineage.

The running theme here is the use of “castle doctrine” where a person has the legal right to use deadly force to defend their home.

Both crime scenes are gruesome and elaborately told. It’s mainly about two murder cases – a female teacher convicted of murdering two students in her house, and the unsolved murders of a landlord and a prospective house buyer in an abandoned adult shop. “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story what happens to the teller what happens to the people?”ĭevil House is a multilayered metafiction told in a nonlinear format divided into 7 parts. His research leads him back to his previous book about a local murder, and forces him to examine his own involvement.

He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected-back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.ĭevil House is John Darnielle's most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.A true-crime writer moves into the notorious “Devil House” where two people were killed, reportedly by teens affiliated with a Satanic cult. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell-his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success-and a movie adaptation-to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.

Devil house a novel by john darnielle