Devil House

A Novel

By: John Darnielle

Narrated by: John Darnielle

Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's Summary

This program will include original music from the author and his bandmate Matt Douglas from The Mountain Goats.

"Darnielle brings a lyrical, literary tone to a novel that's part crime, part horror and wholly original."—Bookpage 

From John Darnielle, the New York Times best-selling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD Books.

©2022 John Darnielle (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Critic Reviews

2022, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

2022, Hudson Booksellers Best of the Year, Long-listed

2022, The Philadelphia Inquirer Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

Disappointing

While an interesting-ish story, this book was very disappointing. It went off into so many different directions.and tangents, at so many times. I found myself wandering or saying aloud, "what the hell is going on?"

The performance of the author/narrator was just awful as well. He was monotone at best, but he spoke in short bursts and weird inflections that made me want just stop listening, which I did several times. There were unnatural silences and breaks that made listening extremely frustrating. It took me a while to get through this because if the narration and the disjointed feel of the story.


I feel like I never got a "payoff at the end" and it left me wishing that I could have back all the hours I spent listening to this.

Swords, Sorcery & VHS Pornography

john darnielle continues on his magical shape shifting point of view tour d'force. Devil House is a story told in voices witch are audible and changeable. his epic Universal Harvester was my gate way drug that got me hooked. Danielle's first two books: Master of Reality and Wolf in White Van are simpler in terms of structure and voice but still manage to confide in a non-confession tone stories of madness in a world going mad. somewhere over the Gravity's Rainbow is a book review that can describe the strange feeling Harvester and Devil leave in their wake: these are stories that make me want to believe in Jesus who can surely understand what I fail to grasp as acceptable answers to my most basic questions: who is really telling the story? what actually happened in this ur-story? is there something wrong with me for liking the cut-up collage den of desecrated porn VHS boxes that is inside the Devil's House? raw.atx

Not Horror, Not Satisfying, Not Fun

Dear Mr. Darnielle: DO NOT NARRATE YOUR OWN BOOKS

Ok, so this guy can write prose and make very pretty and interesting sentences, but can’t pull off a great story even though it’s in the palm of his hand. Kind of sad really.

Wonderful!

This was an awesome listen. Deeply resonates. I started to attempt to articulate its uniqueness but ultimately that would be a spoiler. A deep bow.

a deep examination on True Crime as a genre

I would firstly like to state that I definitely hold some bias as a humongous fan of John Darnielle and anticipated the release of this books for quite some time. now that I've stated that I would like to say that I genuinely enjoy this analysis and intriguing dive into the unknown and less focused on part of True Crime as a genre I really appreciate the style and the fact that it is narrated by him as I enjoy his mannerisms and storytelling all in all I really enjoyed this story

Just couldn’t follow this. At all. Returning it.

The story seems to hop all over the place and the narration, with the pauses every two to three words made it impossible to follow. Every sentence is broken up into at least 3 with all the pausing before the next word. Honestly it was excruciating. Couldn’t even finish. And the porn store descriptions and the list of every single title were really overkill. Never seemed to stop. We get it! It’s a porn store! I’m so sorry this seems mean but just being honest and sharing my own opinion.

Can’t get enough of John Darnielle

So effing good.. keeps you hooked from start to finish. Going to have to listen to it again.

I don't know if he's a better writer or narrator.

phenomenal story, and the fact that the author is the one reading it... there are too many different facets that went into this book to write a worthy review, go see for yourself. But I do believe the audio version brings another level to this book.

Sonically, it slaps

I could listen to Danielle narrate his work all the live long day. Every day.

It's beautiful. He knows what he is doing. Perfectly emotes.

As to the story, Darnielle isn't for everyone. But those few who can dig deep down and find the chord that resonates with the meaning he's trying to convey, you know very well you are. Once that's happened to you once, you won't forget.

If that's you, get the book. It won't disappoint.

A book worm destroys the book it lovingly devours.

Finished John Darnielle’s Devil House tonight, sitting the hot tub, letting the last paragraphs sink into me, work me, kneading fingers, like the hot water. For the past 6 years, I’ve taken in volumes, mini-encyclopedias of information every week, Trump at the Mad Helm, a World Pox, music theory in 6 dimensions strung tight. It’s been wonderful, but it’s also precluded much in the way of getting novels into my head. And a good ol’ crime book, starting back with Ellroy, I gone through such a spate of them, losing myself through much of my 30’s with the way reading Crime grips you, you who are not a criminal, but you who can feel the gong beat of a black heart within just as well as the next. Crime is good, good for you because it’s antiseptic, it’s clarifying, it’s a deep dive that the literate can return from in the way the criminal cannot. A black hole that sucks hard, but that can returned from to greet the light, once it’s fully purged by going through to the end. I love that about reading Crime but, well, over the better part of the past decade, Crime fell off my radar. There was real crime to attend to in the world. The truer than True Crime being committed at the highest rungs of power in this country daily. Current events pressed in and pressed out the work of forensic musing. Darnielle’s brought me back to the place of exquisite wonder, that place you move though god-like and voyeuristically, the spaces where people come to their hedonic apogees in the moments before they fall, always Icarus-like, to their nadir’s. That’s the glee of reading Crime, there is always a pantheon-worthy rush before the ultimate cessation. And in the Devil House, there is no end to the adrenalized musings over the ghastly and the godly. It’s a book about the creation of a book about creativity that is powerful enough to lead to destruction. You dig in, you fall through the worm holes of invention, you devour the book, and then, sated from literary ingestion, what’s left? The chalk lines on the carpet? The cuneiform on the walls? The angel made of porn boxes? That’s the glory of crime fiction, when you come to end, you find, indeed, you’re as culpable as the rest of them. Darnielle reads his own book and invests it with the all the necessary personae to people his dream as if it were yours. He gets in your head and stays there. It’s a hell of a ride. I’m so happy to have been back at it, hard on with all this great Crime.....