Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him.
Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success-and movie adaptation-to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now, he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house-what the locals call "The Devil House"-in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected-back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.
John Darnielle has long been known to millions of Mountain Goats fans as a storyteller of uncanny sensitivity and mythic power. In Universal Harvester and Wolf in White Van before it, he has proven himself a novelist of the highest order. With Devil House, Darnielle rises above with a novel that blurs the line between fact and fiction, which combines daring formal experimentation with a gripping tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.
"Devil House is terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense...It's never quite the book you think it is. It's better."
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Suspenseful, brilliant and chaotically addicting, Devil House triumphs as a page-turning metafictional treatise on the power of narratives cloaked in the trappings of a certifiable true crime classic."
Zack Ruskin, San Francisco Chronicle
"Devil House has all the gross-out hallmarks of horror and true crime while also questioning the moral implications of the genres."
