A review by jomack
Devil House by John Darnielle

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 “I try to honor the dead in my books. It’s one of the things, I hope, that sets me apart a little from my partners in true crime.” 
 
“I resisted it, but I followed the facts where they led: to the other bodies, to the neighborhoods in which they’d lived and died, to the streets beyond them and the highway above. Measure, measure again, then cut. It’s what you’re supposed to do, if you’re honest.” 
 
Come for the spookytastic gothy cover, stay for the dark and luxurious prose that asks you to reckon with what is owed in a world of retelling – if you love stories about stories, then I think you’ll find something worthy in Devil House. 
 
This book opens with a simple enough premise: Gage Chandler, a true crime writer who’s actually enjoyed some success, has just begun working on his new book. It’s come about thanks to a tip from his editor – some time in the 1980s, two people were murdered in an abandoned porn store tucked away in the California town of Milpitas. Details are scant, but it seems like teenagers and devil worship were involved, all of which should make for an enticing novel, and the building in which it all went down is still on the market. Gage’s job is to buy the house, move in, see what he can write. 
 
It has the echoes of a familiar type of horror story, right? Whether you’re reaching for The Haunting of Hill House or Sinister, the horror world is rife with stories of people moving into places where bad things happened, whether unwittingly or no. But this is a book that’s less interested in otherworldly ghosts or demons, and more concerned with the real-world darkness we have to grapple with within ourselves – whether that’s as the victim to unthinkable crime, or as a consumer of the narratives that are spun out around those events. 
 
And so Gage’s story doesn’t proceed in a necessarily neat and familiar way. It begins with him and his new house, but then slowly unfurls to reveal more shades to the story. We learn about his first book, The White Witch of Morro Bay, and we learn about the book he’s currently writing, Devil House. And it’s tucked within these beautifully-written recountings of various, grisly crimes and the people surrounding them that we really start to ramp up into the guts of what this book is about. I won’t “spoil” it (although I don’t think this is a book that’s going be enjoyed if you’re just looking for a shocking revelation or neat pulling-of-the-threads-together sort of final scene), but I think it might help to know that the book is in 7 parts that function in a kind of mirror or accordion way. Basically, understand that there’s a method to the madness here. 
 
“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?” 
 
This question gets asked during a section from the latter half of the book. In some ways, it might be the whole heart of the thing. And man, this question hit for me – time to digress! But basically, it’s a question I’ve been chewing over a lot since earlier this year, when I watched Hulu’s show “Pam & Tommy.” For those who don’t know, it’s a dramatized retelling of the 1995 celebrity scandal when Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape was stolen and, with the help of the nascent internet, circulated and sold to the public. 
 
You can argue about how good the show is or isn’t (it’s mostly well received by critics and it’s just garnered some Emmy nomations, so there’s that), but I think one thing that’s inarguable is how the show wants to position itself as being on Pamela’s side. She’s not portrayed as a one-dimensional joke or a bimbo or a pitiable victim; she’s fully fleshed out, a recognizable person – probably in a similar fashion to how Gage Chandler wants to represent the people he’s writing about. The show introduces us to Pamela Anderson when she’s a small-town waitress in a little town in Canada, sweet faced and easily swept up in the Playboy lifestyle. We follow her and Tommy’s relationship, and the show does a good job of working some genuinely romantic scenes within their absolutely bonkers four-day courtship. 
 
And this matters, because it hits all the harder when the tape – stolen by a repairman who specifically wants to get revenge on Tommy Lee – starts showing up everywhere, and Pamela is the one left facing the most severe consequences, because not only is she a woman, but she’s a woman whose sex appeal is integral to her fame. You ache for her. You feel sick at what you’re watching, and even sicker because there is no “at least it’s fiction!” to take refuge with – this was real, and it happened to real people. 
 
There’s a quote from another Craig Gillespie project, a moment in I, Tonya when Tonya Harding (as played by Margot Robbie) looks at the camera and says “It was like being abused all over again. Only this time it was by you. All of you. You’re all my attackers, too.” It’s stark, and it’s direct, and it’s a little weird, too, because there’s an element to I, Tonya that makes it feel like this movie might also be an attacker. 
 
And the same thing feels like it’s happening within Pam & Tommy. Because this show, a story about a woman who is robbed of consent and the trauma this inflicts upon her, is something that the real life Pamela Anderson wanted nothing to do with. She had no involvement and gave zero blessings (Tommy Lee apparently was the opposite). I think the show has some powerful things to say about celebrity, privacy, and the age of the internet, about the ways we treat each other and what, maybe, we should owe each other as fellow human beings. And despite the fact that it’s a television show, that it’s spinning a narrative and taking some liberties, it’s reset the record when it comes to the scandal and the way Pamela and Tommy were viewed before, as willful purveyors of their own sex tape. There are people who remember that time and think differently about it and Pamela now. 
 
But does any of that matter when the story belongs to someone who doesn’t want it told? 
 
That’s the question that seems to keep cropping up in Devil House, too. It’s the question of who benefits and who suffers, and at what cost. And I think the cost part is what I find especially intriguing today, because although this is a conversation that largely happens in relation to the true crime world, when we live in an age where more and more prestige shows and films are retellings of recent real life events (The Staircase, The Dropout, Inventing Anna, Winning Time, American Crime Story, The Thing About Pam) it becomes more and more important to ask about the money. Who’s getting paid to make this? Who’s buying it to distribute it? Who’s winning awards because of it? 
 
But anyway, the book is about more than my Hulu ramblings; there’s also a lot of interesting writing woven in with questions about the idea of home – what makes a space a home, and what right does a person have to protect their home? And time and again, there are some tender reflections on the relationship between a parent and their child, the beauty and the terror and all that jazz. The writing in this book is so specific, so grounding that you can really see and feel the spaces that Darnielle, through Gage, takes us to. All good books ask you to care and feel for their characters. In this book, the significance of that empathy rises to the top. 
 
I loved this book. I wish I hadn’t read it so fast, because it really does ask to be savored. It doesn’t just dump all theses questions and ideas out on the ground like dirt from a wheelbarrow – John Darnielle knows how to write, and the stories that he tells are fully absorbing here. 
 
All that being said no I still don’t 100% understand Part 4, I can definitely take some guesses and I can see some of the connections to be made but do I get it?  Not really. Basically when I saw that first page I was like ah John, I bet you loved writing this part. So I’m happy for him.