Devil House

By: John Darnielle

Narrated by: John Darnielle

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him when he was a child.

Years later, he is a true crime writer with one grisly success – and a movie adaptation – to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell – his closest childhood friend lived there once upon a time. 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.

Devil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

©2022 John Darnielle (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

"Devil House has all the gross-out hallmarks of horror and true crime while also questioning the moral implications of the genres." (Los Angeles Times)