![]() True Crime is, at the very least, a morally complicated phenomenon: ostensibly journalism, it also serves up actual murder as entertainment. ![]() ‘Devil House’ is about True Crime, as a genre, but what that really means is that it’s about our cultural relationship to murder. Chandler, who’s speciality is the extensive imagining of the spaces in which murders occur, moves into the porn shop, hoping to figure out what really happened there. ![]() ![]() The bodies, badly mutilated, were discovered amidst occult decoration, and local lore has sprung up that the culprits were a practicing Satanic cult. The murders, believed to be the work of local teenagers, happened in an abandoned porn shop. ‘Devil House’ is, loosely speaking, a story about a True Crime writer named Gage Chandler who becomes professionally obsessed with a pair of grisly murders in Milpitas, California. It means they actually liked the book they’re reviewing. I get really excited when reviewers are surprised – it means they aren’t just rubber-stamping things based on cultural consensus. More than that, it got those reviews from reviewers who seemed honestly surprised that the lead singer of the Mountain Goats actually turned out to be able to write good books (I am also surprised, because people aren’t usually good at multiple things). I picked up ‘Devil’s House’ because it got really, really good reviews. It is that very rare thing: a novel which is also an effective moral document, moving, smart, and not annoying. ‘Devil House’ does for murder what I wanted ‘The Final Girl Support Group’ to do for horror. ![]()
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