Devil House

October 15, 2021
The scene of the massacre has been cleaned up. It's been years since the 1986 murders on Halloween in the California town of Milpitas. Gage Chandler, a true-crime author, is moving into the town's former porn store, where supposed devil-worshipping teens apparently committed the murders. Chandler works to get close to his subject, down to reimagining the smells of the past, talking to locals, and searching through any documents or Polaroids he can find to piece together what happened. It's surprising the crime didn't get more attention at the time, unlike the subject of his first book, the story of a teacher who killed two high-school students, which was so exaggerated in the retelling that it reached urban-legend status. Chandler, unlike most of his fellow true-crime writers, is interested not in the stark divisions between victims and villains, but in the complexity of both. In achingly tragic retellings, there is more to both crimes than initially appears to be the case in this labyrinthine quest for the truth. This should draw true-crime devotees as well as crime and general-fiction readers.

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Starred review from October 25, 2021
In this riveting metafictional epic, Mountain Goats singer-songwriter Darnielle (Universal Harvester) flays the conventions of true crime to reveal the macabre and ordinary brutality behind sensationalized stories of violence. True crime writer Gage Chandler has spent the last five years living in the “Devil House” in Milpitas, Calif., where he’s been working on a book about an unsolved murder that took place there in 1986, during the height of the Satanic Panic. Interspliced with Gage’s investigation are long excerpts from one of his previous books, The White Witch of Morro Bay, which recounts the gruesome end for two teenage boys who broke into their teacher’s apartment. Gage’s multilayered narrative of the Devil House murders slowly builds from conjecture to the victims’ ventriloquized voices, lending itself well to Darnielle’s themes about the artifice of the genre: “Formalities, when carefully tended, quietly congregate to make form,” Gage notes. This masterwork of suspense is as careful with its sharp takes as it is with the bread crumbs it slowly drops on the way to its stunning end. It operates perfectly on many levels, resulting in a must-read for true crime addicts and experimental fiction fans alike. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company.

Starred review from November 15, 2021
A true-crime author researches a mass-murder case that prompts him to reconsider his line of work. Darnielle has an affection for the dark side of pop culture and the way fans of supposedly gloom-and-doom genres like heavy metal and horror are more sophisticated than they get credit for. So this smart, twisty novel about true-crime books and the 1980s "Satanic panic" is a fine fit for him and his best so far. The center and main narrator of the novel is Gage, an author who's moved to Milpitas, California, as a kind of stunt: He plans to live on the site of an unsolved double murder that took place on Halloween 1986 in an abandoned porn shop that was defaced with occult imagery. Experience has taught Gage how to write about a case like this: His first book, about a teacher who killed two students in self-defense, became a modestly successful film. But that past begins to gnaw at Gage as he becomes more aware of how the genre demands archetypes that cheapen human loss: "I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money." So the novel becomes a kind of critique of the form, as Darnielle (and Gage) imagines the crime victims (and ideas of victimhood) in more nuanced ways. This takes some odd turns: Substantial passages are written in ersatz Middle English, part of a subplot involving Arthurian legends. But he's excellent at getting into the uncomfortable details of abusive homes and how fear sparks an urge to escape both physically and creatively. And the closing pages cleverly resolve the Milpitas mystery while avoiding sordid crime reportage's demand for scapegoats and simple motives. An impressively meta work that delivers the pleasures of true-crime while skewering it.

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