Devil House

In the award-winning musical Hamilton, the main characters pose a central question: who lives, who dies, who tells your story? But in Devil House, John Darnielle’s new novel, the better question may be: who lives with your story, who gets to tell it?

Gage Chandler is a true crime writer working on his next project, that of an unsolved double homicide in the suburban city of Milpitas, California that took place in 1986. Gage is best known for his book about the so-called White Witch, a woman who slaughtered two of her high school students in her apartment during an attempted robbery. Although Gage’s intention is to tell these stories the “right” way, he’s forced to grapple with the negative impact of the lives of those left behind, especially the mother of one of the White Witch’s victims, who demands he listen to her story.

Devil House brings to light the difficult question of who has the authority to tell someone else’s story, and whether one can ever truly be capable of doing so, no matter the lengths we go to in order to put ourselves in the shoes of others. Sounds serious, right? It is, but we’re discussing it in typical Booklovers fashion, wandering in and out of additional topics like The Mountain Goats (naturally) and what would have happened if Remus had lived instead of Romulus (less naturally).