The setting of the killings is a former adult book and video shop which is hugely unpopular with the local residents but a regular hangout with teens. What is fascinating about this is the murders did not make headline news the first time around, even though they took place during the 1980s Satanic Panic era and looked vaguely ritualistic in nature. Gage is seeking his next literary hit and buys the house which was the scene of an unsolved double murder fifteen years earlier. Sound familiar? If you’ve seen Sinister, you bet it does.
A true-crime writer buys the house which was previously the scene of a gruesome murder and plans to research and write about it. That’s good fiction writing.Even though the main case is non-supernatural, it still reminded me of the hit film Sinister. Darnielle renders this dilemma-and the bad-taste curiosity that compels people to read and write true crime despite reservations-with such depth and clarity that it feels like he’s somehow culpable too. Darnielle impressively dramatizes the writing of a true crime book and the massively deleterious effect the process has on a person genuinely concerned with the ethics of what they’re doing.
Its connection to the narrative is tenuous, it illuminates very little, and perhaps the best evidence that the rest of Devil House is spectacular is that even this section can’t ruin it. The telling of a Welsh legend about King Gorbonianus, it’s written in a dreadful mock medieval syntax. Unfortunately, the novel’s interlude nearly derails the book. The sections set in the Devil House are comparatively conventional, but no less gripping. He sprinkles the first-person throughout as a reminder that it’s Chandler who’s telling the story, and each hits like an unexpected creak, as if I’d been caught watching something I shouldn’t have been. Darnielle skillfully navigates the difficult point of view, pulling the reader ever tighter into the narrative. Ingrained in each part is a question about the nature of true crime and whether it’s possible to write it ethically and with real compassion for the victims. After the first section, detailing Chandler’s project, come alternating sections about the Devil House murders and one of Chandler’s previous books about another case, The White Witch murders.
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