Devil House by John Darnielle is about a true-crime writer who takes his craft to the next level. Gage Chandler buys an abandoned property in small town Milpitas, California. He moves in to write his next book – about a supposed occult double murder that happened in the building two decades prior when it was a pornographic book and video shop.

The future feels dramatic when you think you see a little of it cresting the horizon, the more so if the present feels routine.

After he moves in, Chandler starts recreating the crime scene, interviewing locals and scouring eBay for artifacts from the time of the murders. He interrogates rumours about what happened, searching for scraps of facts to sew together into a narrative.

But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.

The world building is vivid in this story as the lives of disenfranchised small town teenagers are unpacked with a shifting broken narrative and Chandler grapples with the moral dilemma of writing about other people’s suffering.

There is, among the public, a perennial urge to believe the worst about the generation that will eventually replace them.

Devil House is gothic horror meets true-crime and almost fantasy…go there if you dare…bwahahaha!