Devil House by John Darnielle

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD) on January 25, 2022

Like all writers, true crime writers must make choices about the stories they tell. Maybe they make the wrong choices. Maybe they tell the wrong stories. Maybe they shade truth with fiction. Those thoughts underlie Devil House, a novel about a true crime writer who comes to question his craft.

The novel imagines that two significant crimes occurred in Milpitas. A teen strangled his girlfriend in 1981. Some of his friends were aware of the crime, saw the girl’s body, but said nothing about it. A movie called River’s Edge publicized the crime, raising predictable questions about the apathy of youth and suggesting the decline of civilization. Five years later, a realtor and a potential property buyer were slashed to death with a sword inside an abandoned porn shop. Teens who used the porn shop as a clubhouse may been involved. The people of Milpitas refused to talk about the crime, having suffered enough reputational damage from River’s Edge.

An editor finds the story of the porn shop murders and sends it to true crime writer Gage Chandler, whose first book — The White Witch of Morro Bay — recounted the story of two unarmed students, Jesse and Gene, who broke into the home of a female teacher with the intent to steal her property. The teacher was in the kitchen. She happened to be holding a knife when the boys entered her home. When Gene touched her breast while trying to ease the knife out of her hand, she snapped. After she finished stabbing both kids to death — while they are retreating from the home — she dismembered them in an effort to conceal the crime. The media portrayed the teacher as having groomed the kids with the intent to turn them into a human sacrifice. Chandler’s version of the truth was less sensational.

Chandler is reluctant to take on another book about teens, but he admits that the story of the porn shop murders is intriguing. He moves to Milpitas in 2001, buys the building, and recreates the murder scene because that’s the immersive method that he uses to write his books. Chandler decides to call the murder scene the Devil House. The killer was never charged; his identity remains the subject of conjecture. Or so Chandler tells the reader from time to time. The truth is obscure because, at the end of the first chapter, Chandler reveals that he has decided not to tell the story that he came to Milpitas to tell. In fact, Chandler starts the book by telling the reader that Devil House is not the true crime book he had contracted to write. It is instead “about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates.”

Chandler's reconstruction of the crime follows the owner of the porn shop, a man who is trying to remake his life in the small town, having failed in San Jose. After repeated rent increases, the owner decides to walk away from the store, leaving everything behind, knowing he’ll never get his cleaning deposit back from the landlord he despises.

Chandler then follows the teen who works in the porn shop, a seemingly ordinary kid named Derek who is finding a late high school balance between slacking and planning for an adult life. Derek keeps a key when the owner walks away from the shop. Chandler follows Derek’s friend Seth, an artistic loner who begins the project of remaking the porn shop, repurposing magazine and video covers as the tools of an art project that transforms the store into a haunted house. Chandler follows a homeless kid named Alex who begins to live in the shop, a kid who has some mental health issues and, like so many homeless people, has fallen through the cracks. Derek lets Alex stay in the shop because Derek is a decent kid.

After building a picture of the abandoned porn shop's occupants, Chandler follows his own efforts to turn his new dwelling into a crime scene. He tells of his investigation, his interviews, the documents and pictures he finds on eBay. Eventually he sorts the details into the story of two deaths. But is the story accurate? Can the truth ever be known? Do readers even want to know the truth?

The narrative pulls together several themes. More than once, we see how society throws away people who are homeless or mentally ill or poor or obviously troubled, creating a recipe for violence or despair that could be avoided by recognizing people who need help and helping them.

One chapter consists of Chandler reading a letter from Jesse’s mother, a letter that takes him to task for not telling her story, for leaving the impression that Jesse was a bad kid of her creation. That chapter could be read as an indictment of true crime writing. Even when true crime avoids sensationalism — a rare feat — even when it tunnels down to true causes of crime, it will only tell part of the story, perhaps the least important part. The mother’s lengthy letter is a controlled howl of pain from a parent who did her best and whose worthiness as a mother Chandler chose to ignore.

The final chapter, as Chandler meets up with a childhood friend who briefly lived in Milpitas, explores the malleability of memory and the dubious process of recreating the past. In that chapter, we learn that the story Chandler appears to be telling (we never see the final version) omits important facts about the crime and the killer and changes names while inventing at least one character who never existed. It seems that Chandler took liberties with the “true” part of “true crime” in the service of protecting the innocent. In any event, truth in the modern world is simply what someone chooses to believe. Truth has become the story that best fits our belief system, not the story that is best supported by verifiable facts.

The final chapter also invites discussion of “stand your ground” laws and whether they apply to squatters (they don’t, but some “stand your ground” advocates believe it’s appropriate to use violence against anyone in any location who is perceived as an intruder). The Devil House killer may have seen himself as protecting his castle from intruders. The teacher had a stronger “stand your ground” defense until she went after Jesse, who was trying to get out of the home when she killed him. If she hadn’t hacked him into pieces, she might have been acquitted.

An odd chapter called The Song of Gorbonian is the novel’s only misstep. Retelling a medieval Welsh legend, the fantasy about avenging a father’s death might have been intended to speak to issues raised by the larger narrative, but its attempt to capture an early version of English is a stylistic fail.

Fortunately, the rest of the novel is riveting and unpredictable. Its attention to detail, its focus on characters at the margin, and its philosophical exploration of truth make Devil House an impressive work.

RECOMMENDED