John Darnielle’s New Thriller, ‘Devil House,’ Digs into the Uneasy Tensions between Humanity and the Headlines
originally Published: jan 26, 2022“Telling any story at all has stakes, you know, whether it’s true or not.”
When East Durham’s Golden Belt complex changed hands in 2017, most tenants were pushed out. Author and musician John Darnielle was the last one out of the building.
“I was in the building when we were all getting forced out,” Darnielle says in a phone interview that (delightfully) stretches nearly an hour past the allotted 20 minutes we’d scheduled. “They forced out the YouthBuild people, who gave mainly young Black men who were on the margins a chance to get their GED and to find work. I would see these guys every morning and then they all got forced out as well.”
As other nonprofits, artists, and businesses cleared out, Darnielle sat in his office writing a book about sacred spaces, changing towns, and the potential of youth. It was also about murder. There isn’t exactly a traditional bad guy in Devil House, his novel, which released on January 25. But that isn’t all that surprising if you know his work: Darnielle doesn’t often work in absolutes. The closest thing to an antagonist in Devil House is a coldhearted property developer. This, too, was tied to the setting he was writing from.
“There was a basketball court there with a backstop that had a big artwork about people who had died in the local neighborhood,” Darnielle says. “They knocked that whole thing down. This stuff was primary in my mind while I was writing.”
Like Darnielle’s earlier novels, 2014’s Wolf in White Van, which was nominated for a National Book Award for fiction, and 2017’s Universal Harvester, Devil House isn’t easy to categorize. It will appeal to fans of true crime and horror, but it also serves as a critique of violence-fueled content. It’s also artful, organized in a chiastic structure with a backward-looping narrative characteristic of many classical texts, but not inaccessible…
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