This one was a physical location, a building here in Durham that seems only to have operated as a business for a very short period of time. John Darnielle: Super good and interesting question-I’m always very interested in the beginnings of my books, in the departure point. How did Gage Chandler first come into focus? An incident or a story that stayed with you. I caught up with Darnielle to ask him about the book’s inspiration, his experiences of true crime culture, and how crime stories transform into legend.ĭwyer Murphy: Can you take me through the early inspiration for this book? It feels like one that had a definite starting point. Devil House soon spirals outward and becomes an uncanny portrait of a town, its people, its secrets, and the long, complicated afterlife of violence and tragedy. In his latest novel, Devil House, a true crime writer finds himself adrift, disenchanted with his life and work, and eventually drawn to a small-town in California and a house that was the site of a notorious crime supposedly caught up in the 1980s Satanic Panic. (His 2014 novel, Wolf in White Van, might be one of the most slyly disquieting works to come around in a long while, but Universal Harvester (2017) certainly gave it a run for its money.) There’s a Hitchcockian element to his work, in that sense: an ever-building dread, along with the anticipation at turns to come and what they might expose. From the outset, you’re fairly certain that what appears to be a modest, brooding text will transform into a howl of loneliness and a prolonged meditation on some of life’s rawest forms of pain, but you’re not quite sure how it will all go down. Coming fresh to a new work by the author and musician John Darnielle is a deeply unsettling experience.

Devil house darnielle