Devil House by John Darnielle

How, in this age, are grown-ups still afraid of a witch? Spells, curses, bloody sacrifices: none of them really believe in any of that, do they? It's just for fun, that stuff. You had assumed everybody knew that. It seemed obvious, self-evident. There aren't any witches. There are just the stories people tell each other, who knows why. But when you finally go to trial, almost a whole year from now, you'll learn better, and feel trapped. Four days from now you'll do what you have to do, and, when your story is assembled by the powers that have agreed to do the telling, meaningless details will be woven into a tale that will seem absurd to everyone if they weren't all proceeding backward from its bloody end.

Gage Chandler is a moderately successful true crime writer: a few years ago, he optioned one of his books, The White Witch of Morro Bay, into a film, which has set him up comfortably. He hasn't had that kind of success since, but his editor nudges him into purchasing a house in the small California town of Milpitas where, in its former life as a porn outlet, two people were killed by sword. Chandler's method is both scrupulous and based entirely on vibes: he moves into the house, tracks down boxes of paraphernalia from the crime on eBay, and laboriously absorbs every detail of the house and the lives of the three high school boys accused of the crime.

The middle section of Devil House presents a version of the book-in-progress. Its protagonists are the three teens: Derrick, an ambitious and intelligent senior who works part-time in the porn shop without his parent's knowledge; Seth, a class-clown type without Derrick's prospects; and Alex, a homeless friend who has recently returned to Milpitas. After the shop closes, Derrick sees it as a place to spend a few daily hours with Seth, but Seth becomes even more attached to it as a kind of refuge. And for Alex, it's a place to sleep. Without Derek's knowledge, the two other boys--tipped off that the owner is trying to sell it to an investor--turn the shop into an elaborate painted and decorated "Devil House," naively thinking it might scare them away. In Chandler's telling, it's Alex, fatigued from sleeplessness and oppressed by the desperation of homelessness, who kills the two. Chandler's method, we learn late in the book, involves recreating the gruesome house, with its angel sculpted from porno video cases and its broken mirrors glued to the walls, bit by bit.

Devil House is a complicated, perhaps overly complicated book. The main story of the Devil House murders, and Chandler's investigation of it, is complimented by sections from his big hit, The White Witch of Morro Bay. In some ways, this story is a mirror of the Devil House story, in which the teenagers are the victims rather than the murderers. In Chandler's telling, a troubled teen named Gene, accompanied by an impressionable friend named Jesse, tried to rob their teacher at home. (We're meant to read Gene-Jesse and Derrick-Seth as reflections of one another, I think, versions of Cyrus and Jeff from The Mountain Goats' "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," a pairing of two lonely and codependent boys.) The teacher, freaking out, stabbed the teens to death and tried to dispose of their bodies by cutting them to pieces. Later, the media frenzy turned this teacher into a monster, a Satanist who beguiled the two boys. Chandler's book, we're told, is an attempt to recover the "truth" of that teacher's story, the kernel beyond the hysteria. And so perhaps he might do the same for the Devil House killers, though unlike the teacher, they were never formally accused, much less convicted.

But Chandler's belief in his methods is rocked when he receives a long letter from the mother of Jesse, one of the boys murdered at Morro Bay, who has nursed a long anger about the way her son was depicted in the book. (I think one indication of the fact that this book is just too complicated is how long I'm spending just trying to get the basic summary of it down.) So what does this say about the true crime genre? Chandler seems more conscientious than most, less interested in luridness; his method is scrupulous to a fault. But perhaps he's only comforting himself by telling himself that one can tell a full story simply by being methodical; Jesse's mother wants him to see how he slighted her son, shrunk him to a few facts on a page. The story she tells--which is told to us by Chandler--is a story of a hard life under an abusive father, and a dream of escape. These details, I'm almost certain, are inspired by Darnielle's similarly difficult childhood, which he's explored in his music with the Mountain Goats. They have a great pathos, but I found myself wondering what it is they really had to say, and why they seem to affect Chandler so greatly. Isn't it clear to anyone who's written a story that it's not the same as telling the "whole truth?" Was Chandler really under the impression that he'd told Jesse's story in full? Or that such a thing was possible?

In the end--big spoiler alert here--the story about the three teens at Devil House turns out to be a complete fabrication. Chandler's made it up. The "real story," such as it is, is about a group of homeless men who had been using the porno shop as a place to live. By turning them into teens, with ambitions and futures, perhaps, not yet calcified into identities that are assigned permanent value, Chandler provides them with sympathy, and shelters the real killers from the ignominy of seeing their lives flattened in the way that Jesse's was. I guess. In the end, I'm not totally sure why he did it, or why it's better than telling a flawed version of "the truth." (Additional references to a separate kid, a recent immigrant named Siraj on whom suspicion falls--but who is also made up--felt really baffling to me.) There's a nuance here that keeps Devil House from being Life of Pi, but I wouldn't say it's much more interesting.

So Devil House is, on a surface reading, a sort of muddled book about the true crime genre. But I want to suggest an alternative understanding that makes the book more interesting, and I think, a little more successful: Devil House is about real estate. I mean it: when Chandler purchases the Devil House, his first feeling is one of satisfaction. Even though it's for a job, he really does own a home, and the sense of security and rootedness that comes with it. By contrast, the unhoused men who killed the slumlord did so because they were afraid of losing the little bit of housing security they had scrounged up. In Chandler's fictionalized version, that impulse is assigned to the homeless Alex and the troubled Seth, two kids who have few places to call their own in the world. There's a strange little section, written in difficult Gothic font, that tells the story of a prince named Gorbonian, which many readers have wondered about. I think this section makes sense when paired with the courtly language that the book-within-a-book sometimes indulges in; both are representations of Alex's perception of himself as a knight defending a realm. Later on, this is made explicit when Chandler discusses the "Castle Doctrine," which says a man has a right to defend his home by any means necessary.

Devil House is a pretty flawed book, I think. But focusing more on the House and less on the Devil makes it more coherent and more compelling. And I do think it's the best of Darnielle's three books, which include Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester. The prose itself is more accomplished, and the story--even if it's too complex, and too clever--is more effective.