You’ll excuse me the platitude, but John Darnielle is undoubtedly a stylist and an atmospheric writer and not a great storyteller at all. It is undoubtedly smart and also meant to be heartbreaking, but Devil House never really amounts to more than the sum of its parts. If our myths become larger than life, it's because we make assumptions that make them so, based on unrelated factors. The deeper Gage Chandler gets into his research, the more self-evident it gets : the truth about our myths is disjointed. I'm aware this description is thoroughly unsexy to 99% of the people reading this, but it doesn't make my description false. Given that John Darnielle is the frontman of a popular indie folk rock band, it shouldn't surprise anybody.ĭevil House is a metafictional deconstruction of contemporary American myths. The best way I could describe it is that it's a literary novel about American mythmaking. I love novels that turn old ideas on their heads to create something new. Devil House is only metaphorically haunted, which is cool in theory. I don't know if this is a spoiler, but it was in the horror section at my local book store and I feel like this is borderline misrepresentation. That’s that best way I can put it without spoiling anything. While doing his background research on the project, Chandler meets different characters and confronts the twisted history of the titular devil house, but the house will also check out what he's made of as a person and a writer. I know what you're thinking, but it doesn't go down that road at all. I really like books that do this usually, but I don't know what this one in particular is trying to say.ĭevil House tells the story of Gage Chandler, a successful true crime writer with latent mommy issues who decides to move into a murder house for his next project.

This conundrum perhaps can't be better exemplified than by John Darnielle's third novel Devil House, which is not what it presents itself to be. Some of the best books have the most straightforward covers and some of the best books can’t possibly be boiled down to a single image.

You can totally do it and result may vary. The old saying that you shouldn't judge book by its cover is imprecise at best.

The devil's house book