Reviews with content warning for Violence - Devil House

I really enjoyed this! Such a thoughtful look at horror and crime, the purposes of storytelling and the concept of truth. It is definitely focused on character over plot and experimental in places, but there are also some really shocking moments of gore and horror, so I don't quite agree with those saying this isn't a horror novel... I think it is, it's just a character-driven one. I'd recommend this to readers who enjoyed Reprieve and House of Leaves.

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professor_jango's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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mmccombs's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.5

I might have to come back to this rating and review because honestly I don’t know how to! This was not what I expected but that’s not a bad thing, I think it’s just a story I will have to turn around in my mind a few more times before I have clear thoughts. The format was so interesting, I could tell that Darnielle was enjoying himself which makes for a fun read! I was maybe a little confused about the old English and the knight stories in there, but it made for compelling through lines about storytelling and “truth” and place as it relates to history. I really liked this one but am also still trying to figure it out I think??

“What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?”

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skudiklier's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book is about murder and a true crime author, to an extent, but it is more accurately about what happens when you tell a story that has real consequences for real people; it's about truth, and sensationalism, and voyeurism. It has horrifically graphic violence, which is not my thing at all, but I feel like it would be hard for any reader to come away from this book with an uncomplicated love for true crime.

Devil House is one of those books that's hard to really talk about without spoiling the ending. Every chapter complicates the story further, until the synopsis seems barely what the story is really about at all. It's made me think about the meaning of truth as some pure ideal, and about what the point of telling any story is. I'm a writer of poetry, not prose, but I think this book will still impact how I think about writing moving forward.

I don't like true crime, and if I didn't read everything John Darnielle writes, it's very likely I would never have been interested in this book. Some parts were indeed more gruesome than I would have liked, but overall I'm glad I read it.

It also is of course written well, in the same style as Darnielle's other novels. There's a lot of second-person narration, which I think works well in this context. I wrote down a lot of quotes that I really enjoyed (and the only reason I'm not sharing any is that this review is long enough already).

Mild spoilers ahead, in my central complaint of the book:

Update from a few months after I originally wrote this review: I took the below section out of my B&N review now that the book is out, because I think in the actual book this chapter may be less distracting. It has a different font to signal something weird is going on (which I didn't have in my eARC), and it does connect to things in the book of course, so I was just too caught up in how weird it was I guess. I'm leaving the below just in case, but feel free to ignore it.

Several chapters take place in different time periods, with different narrators and main characters, but nearly all of them are still obviously connected. However, there's one chapter in the middle that is about an entirely different thing, and written in a different style; it almost feels like a different book altogether. You could argue that there are minor things linking it to the rest of the text, but it still feels very odd. And to top it all off, that chapter ends in the middle of a sentence.

Because I was reading an ARC, I genuinely wondered if the chapter simply weren't finished, if no one noticed it wasn't complete before letting readers like me have access to the book. But near the end of the book, a character is reading the manuscript Chandler has for Devil House, and it ends in the middle of a sentence, confusing the reader. This led me to believe that perhaps this odd chapter in the middle of the book is actually meant to end that way, and the reader is supposed to be confused.

I can appreciate this on a stylistic level, and in hindsight I can see how this chapter may relate to the rest of the book. I also have a lot of respect for John Darnielle, and am generally inclined to think any weird stuff he does is genius. But I have to say that that chapter may lose some readers (it's not short and there's no payoff), and may frustrate more. I look forward to reading interviews with Darnielle about this book, in the hopes that he might explain this decision in a way that justifies the negative aspects.

(Again though, I'm still not 100% convinced it was intentional. Maybe it would feel different for a reader with a fully published copy.)

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