devil house

review

i think devil house is trying to be something that it isn’t. it’s trying to be an interesting, unnerving look at the act of investigating someone’s death for the entertainment of others. at moments, especially near the beginning, it does that really well! unfortunately, it fails to stay that way by severely overcomplicating the structure of the book, without giving anything interesting enough to grasp onto.

devil house is split up into two different side stories, one of which is far more interesting than the other. at points, the book is gage putting the pieces of a mystical crime back together, the killing of two in a satanic panic-era building. other times, it’s exploring the main character’s previous true crime story, one that plunged him directly into fame as a true crime author: the killing of two young men who attempted a burglary. sometimes it pans back into the two young men found dead in the titular devil house. one chapter is a complete shift in tone, an almost medieval tale of gage’s familial past.

the main problem is that none of these concepts are never given the weight that each of them deserve, because the book constantly decides to obfuscate everything through more and more layers that just feel unnecessary. it’s engaging, to a point, but by the end of my time with the book, i realized that i just never grew to care about anything in the book all that much.

you never really learn all that much about gage, or the teacher and students at the core of his previous book, or the two young men who previously inhabited the devil house. you’re never given enough time to actually care about any of these characters, or marvel at the situation they’re in, before it decides to jump to another point in time. i really, really want to care about each of these plot beats, because what’s here is extremely intriguing, but i’m just not given the time to. it’s kind of frustrating.

as a whole, devil house just feels a little hobbled together, and while some of the disjointed-ness feels intentional, that feeling of disconnection really drags down what could’ve been a really interesting read.

score

5/10

notes

• written by john darnielle
• published by MCD
• released in 2022
• crossposted to goodreads