Devil House was a slow burn. I talked about my overall reading experience here, and some of the things I mentioned there come to bear on this, but the more time I spend thinking about this book, the more I’m struck by how gradually it reveals its interests. The slowness of the burn is what makes that ultimate revelation so satisfying, subverting our understanding of the world that it so meticulously created. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. The slow inevitable reveal of a mystery is the promise of a true crime book. It’ll lay out the world for you if you in turn give it attention, make clear what was opaque at the beginning. Where Devil House starts to rise above some of the other works in this space has to do with how it’s not just illuminating a mystery, it’s also examining how telling a mystery story writes something back onto the world in turn.
The more this book played with these ideas, the more I started to think of other works in the true crime space, and how this book belongs among them: Zodiac, Serial Season One, In Cold Blood. Like those other great works, this one utilizes the conventions of the genre while challenging them at the same time. In so doing, these stories push the genre past its limitations, allow for different and more interesting stories to be told. It probably goes without saying, but spoilers for anything and everything about this book and its plot are below. If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend reading the book before going any further.
One of the most satisfying things in art is a successful twist. And for me, a subgenre of the twist that is especially powerful is the genre/subject twist. Something seems to be about one thing, but is actually about something else. You thought you were watching a family drama? Think again buster, this is about aliens. The Power of the Dog is a recent example. What seems like a relatively straightforward story about toxic masculinity on the frontier is actually a murder mystery. Parasite is another one. That movie almost defies genre. It’s an older example, but the final reveal in Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply falls into this category for me. All along, you’re watching this mystery being solved, but in the closing pages, you learn that you were focused on the wrong mystery. And Atonement! And The French Lieutenant’s Woman! In all of them, the twist you’ve been trained to look for was a red herring, and you never saw the actual one that was being set up. You got a double twist! A bonus twist! Two twists for the price of one!
There’s a chance for this move to go really wrong (hello, Serenity). Instead of that twist being rewarding, it’s deflating (and more importantly, bugnuts). It nullifies the time you’ve spent with the thing instead of enriching it. A movie I probably think about more than most people is the 2008’s [The Brothers Bloom] (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844286/). In it, Adrian Brody’s character, a con man, says that the perfect con is on where all the participants get exactly what they wanted. Being conned doesn’t necessarily mean being taken advantage of. It means that the world is different from what you thought it was. And as someone who is constantly disappointed by the world turning out to be different from what I thought it was, it’s really nice when that reveal happens in a curated and rewarding way. Genre conventions get used to help build up these worlds that will come tumbling down satisfactorily. John Darnielle (JD, hereafter) in Devil House not only uses these conventions to build up the world, but he actively draws your attention to them throughout the book, and, for my money, that makes the ultimate twist all the more satisfying.
Before going any further, it’s worth getting specific on what twist we’re talking about. The two paragraphs above serve as kind of spoiler zone buffer, so if any speed readers with wandering eyes glance down, there’s still a chance the book’s ending can remain unspoiled. No longer though. In the closing pages of Devil House, the narrator, Gage, who is an author of true crime books, and has been detailing the writing process of a book centered on some murders that happened in the titular devil house, reveals that he’s more or less invented the characters and events that you’ve just been reading about (presumably a big no-no in the world of true crime). This kind of move can go bad. In unsuccessful examples of this, you feel that you’ve been led down a path, only to be told that you’re on the wrong path. But you brought me here, you say. In Devil House and other successful examples, you’re led down a path, and instead of being told that you’re on the wrong path, you’re told to look behind you, and everything looks different than it did when you first walked past it. So then our question becomes, how does JD lay the groundwork for this late-novel revelation to be both rewarding and meaningful? By making the novel largely about genre and its conventions, JD draws our eye to the seams in how how these stories are constructed, so when the true nature of the world is revealed, we can appreciate both the thematic implications as well as the structural elements that support it all.
one
how he sets it up
Genres are important. They give us guardrails. You know what you’re getting into. A cozy mystery is going to feel a certain kind of way. Elevated horror is going to feel very different. You know what a late-stage Tom Cruise movie is going to feel like because Tom is discerning enough to only create art wherein he’s allowed to run with a fury no other mortal can achieve. Devil House situates itself at this unexpected boundary between well-established genres: literary fiction and true crime. It allows the book to have its cake and eat it too by using the conventions of true crime (the propulsiveness of a mystery, our fascination with the macabre) as well as those of literary fiction (deconstruction, commentary, using the word ‘problematizing’). So many great works follow this pattern of loosely using the conventions of one genre to tell a story that wouldn’t otherwise be achievable. Some of Shakespeare’s most interesting plays have the bones of a comedy, but hit you in ways not dissimilar from tragedy. In a play like The Winter’s Tale the conventions of a comedy comforts the audience and gives the play an arena in which it can examine some pretty non-comedic themes. Something similar is happening in Devil House.
JD draws your attention to these genre conventions in many different ways, and in so doing, he gets to use them to push the narrative forward but also lay a conceptual framework onto which the novel’s late-stage twist can be placed. The most obvious way that this happens is by having Gage describe his writing process so much. Over and over again, you’re being shown how the larger story behind the titular devil house is being constructed. The narrator talks through his research and writing. You see how he organizes his files, for goodness sake. There are several references to craft talks that the narrator gives at writing conferences. Over and over again, he’s showing you how you create a story to elicit a certain response in a reader. Nothing is there by accident, and that makes one of the stranger elements in the novel stand out even more.
Two-thirds of the way through the novel exists the Gorbonian section, a differently-fonted and surprising novella about revenge in pre-modern England crops up. I It’s such a departure from everything else in the book. As a thing to read, I don’t know that I love it, but as an element in this larger thematic gumbo it feels really important. Structurally, it sits between the bulk of the novel’s setup and its final acts. It’s the finger that tips the first domino over. It’s jarring. It needs to be. We need to be shocked by how out of left field this thing is. Just parsing the font is no easy feat! The shock of it all highlights how much we rely on familiar surroundings to consume culture. All of a sudden, you’re without the guardrails you’d gotten used to. Forced to try and make sense of this world you don’t understand. The the conventions of genre are different, but the purposes and uses of narrative are the same. In the section, you recognize archetypes and narrative structures that continue today. Again, JD is pulling at the seams of how the way we tell and inherit stories reinforces our understanding of the world.
Time and time again, this novel draws your attention to genre. It is fundamentally about genre, and Ggven that, the next question has to be why? Why does JD spend so much shoe leather drawing our attention to the trusses and beams holding up the world that he’s built?
two
how he knocks it down
Late in the novel, the narrator draws our attention to genre expectations. Describing a letter he received from someone associated with one of his previous books, the narrator says he knew the story’s end “both from recognizing where we now stood in the story line and from the diminishing number of pages left to read, was near.” The physical boundaries of the thing affect his expectations of it. Stories, this novel encourages us again and again to recognize, depend on their conventions to have meaning. We know to read the final paragraph in a chapter with a little extra attention since it’s likely to contain something important for our understanding of the novel. We know what to do with a story’s ending, how to glean meaning from it, because we’ve spent a lifetime reading stories that reveal their meaning at the end.
Again, JD sets this up carefully and repeatedly throughout the book. The most glaring, flashing neon lights, example of this is the conceit book the narrator is writing: purchasing and living in the titular devil house while writing about it. His experience of the world is filtered through the house he lives in, that he’s telling a story about. The type of story you tell is going to affect that experience and your understanding of it, and vice versa. The narrator’s descent into doubt about his work comes after a long struggle against this. Partway through the novel, he poses some hypothetical questions that highlight these tensions:
What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it?
What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens
to the people?
He continues this line of questions after a section break: “What other books might I have written about the murders of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp?” The subtext of that question is that the way a story is told writes something back onto the world. Observation has an impact on the thing observed[1]. How we tell that story matters. It matters even more when we’re telling a story about a place that we live.
In the second half of the novel, multiple new genres are introduced. Before the Gorbonian section, we’re comfortably in the world of true crime. After the medieval business, we’re in decidedly murkier waters. The narrator receives a long letter from the parents of a boy whose murder he described in one of his earlier books, and this letter takes control of the novel. The narrative voice shifts to this other person. And the story that person tells reframes our understanding of the earlier parts of the book. In these earlier sections, Gage recounts the events around his first book. The letter he receives from one of the victim’s mother challenges his understanding of the world he described in that book. The mother recounts Gage’s experience from her perspective, and this causes a profound crisis of confidence. More importantly to our point here, it feels like the received letter, the thing that doesn’t fit into the conventions of a true crime story, is what causes this rupture. The genre conventions he’d become so adept at using served as blinders as much as they did guide ropes.
In the final section of the book, the narration shifts away from Gage entirely, and moves to his childhood friend who describes their shared childhood and serves as witness for the book’s final events. Stylistically, this section reads more like a memoir than anything that came before it. It also allows us to inhabit the perspective of someone watching all the genre play at hand. If you’re not careful, things can start to spin out here. You’re hearing an account of someone accounting someone else themselves. That destabilization matters. It’s as if Gage loses his ability to control the narrative. That’s no mean feat. Remember he owns the land on which this story takes place. He lives in the house. This is quite literally his turf. No longer are we in a true crime story, but it’s not exactly clear what kind of story we’re in. This uncertainty and this shift allows the novel’s final revelations to take place.
three
how it comes together in the end
JD harnesses all of the energy created by the unsolved mystery and uses it against the reader. The anticipation you feel as the book winds down is focused on the mystery at the heart of the devil house. Did one of these lovable nerds kill this unlikable realtor? And the ultimate revelation that those nerds don’t actually exist happens almost off-handedly. As if it doesn’t matter. Which leads to final question the book asks of us. Does it?
An unresolved or poorly resolved mystery is unsatisfying. Imagine you never got to see how they pulled off the heist in Ocean’s 11. Not fun! You wouldn’t fully appreciate the smiles that George Clooney and Brad Pitt share in front of the fountain. And yet, the dissolution of the mystery in Devil House almost feels like a relief. Part of that is due to how much we’ve become endeared to the kids in the house. The larger part, to my mind, is that it allows us to see what the book is actually about, what JD’s been driving at all along. It’s the prestige! Only instead of Hugh Jackman drowning, we get a kind of meditation on the role that genre and myth play in our understanding of the world. The book becomes about what it means to tell stories. What it means to have myth mapped onto the world.
Our new narrator tells a story about ‘the Mean Man’ in this final section. “It was Gage,” he says who
“passed on the legend of the Mean Man […] it held the allure of ancient myth: when we’d walk past the Mean Man’s house, Gage would find some detail to indicate the threat that lay within. His gifts forlocating new features in a relatively drab landscape were considerable.”
Like any child of the 90s, it’s hard to read this without thinking of the old man in Home Alone. And, as is normally the case, Home Alone is instructive. Marley isn’t allowed to be a person when he exists as a myth. He’s Kevin McCallister’s Mean Man. It’s not until Kevin is confronted by Marley that he’s able to interact with him as a person. Before, Marley was a horror movie come to life on his street. After, he’s a sweet guy, dishing out advice.
In a more nuanced way, something similar is happening here. Our experience of genre, how our mind sorts things into familiar categories has an effect on the thing being sorted. I’ve written before about how little I understand quantum mechanics, but I understand there’s something called the observer effect that says basically what I just said above, only with particle physics. Ending up at this place, the novel achieves the perfect con (in addition to being about how cons work).
One of the things I’ve always loved about Jeff Darnielle’s works (books, musics, great tweets) is his ability to present the world in mythic terms. It’s why a verse describing the inside of a Burger King feels on fire with the same stuff as an Arthurian legend. Given that, it makes sense that he’d have an interest in the ways that myths affect our world and affect us as recipients or tellers. Still, I can’t help but sit here a little gob-smacked at how successfully he was able to do that in this book. It’s a remarkable feat. It comes close to putting him in the auto-purchase tier of contemporary writers. Up there with the likes of Saunders, Robinson, Whitehead, Groff. People whose ability to describe the world is so precise and interesting that you’re willing to follow their interests wherever they lead.