While Universal Harvester gave an eerie portrait of the abyssal loneliness of Iowa corn country, Devil House lands us in a haunted northern California. He evokes a powerful sense of place, too. 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.” My friend lives near there, he saw the burning bodies. I heard one guy was covered in oil but he didn’t burn. 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. This last strand is the most intriguing, landing the novel in an interesting space somewhere between Atonement and the Serial podcast.ĭarnielle likes obscurity and the gaps between facts, where rumours swell like mushrooms. 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 sets the stage for the third novel by American musician and author John Darnielle.
Why doesn’t Gage move in, investigate the murders and write his next book? 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. Abandoned after a spell as a pornographic book and video shop, it subsequently became the site of a little known, possibly occult double murder. D evil House begins with a proposal from true crime author Gage Chandler’s editor: a property is for sale in the California town of Milpitas.
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