Adverse Possession
Devil House is a parable about this appetite for truth and justice that asks where along the way we lost the stomach for mercy.
Review by Charlie Clark
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,” wrote Joan Didion. In his fourth novel, John Darnielle makes a case for this distinctly Californian take on property rights. But then there are at least two Californias, and the late Queen Joan of Sacramento speaks for only one of them: the endlessly expanding, self-mythologizing Californian dreamscape. Besides which you have Official California, where a place belongs to whoever has the proper paperwork.
Devil House is about this Californian civil war, with a ragtag band of teens straight from central (out)casting to play the partisans of the Dream State. It’s Darnielle’s second entry in a sparsely populated genre I might describe as anti-horror—the spooky stuff is mostly misdirection. Insofar as there’s a monster in this book, it’s the California real estate market. Insofar as he’s rooting for the teens against the monster, Darnielle is taking sides against “reality” itself.
The way Darnielle’s story is told should put horror fans in mind of Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts or, especially, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The primary narrator, Gage Chandler, is a true crime writer whose agent puts him onto an unsolved double murder with a connection to the occult. Chandler moves into the so-called “Devil House” to assemble the facts for his next book. Inside this frame, the novel consists of “primary sources” alongside Chandler’s commentary and reconstructions of events (and also a mysterious, thematically important but plot irrelevant, section of material set in a Gothic typeface).
What is the non-simple explanation, the true history of Devil House?
L
ike any crime novel, the majority of Chandler’s story is concerned with what Devil House was and what happened there, but his reflections on the true crime genre cast doubt on any claim to objectivity, including his own. “I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money,” he says. As for his readers: “Nobody cares about the actual details of anything, they just want the feeling they get when the story punches their buttons.” From the perspective of the true crime marketplace, the story of Devil House has a clear path of least resistance: “The simple explanation that would have scratched several itches was that a cabal of Satan-worshipping teens had sacrificed a couple of innocent victims to the devil for kicks.”
What, according to Chandler, is the non-simple explanation, the true history of Devil House? Once upon a time, there was a house in Milpitas, California. We are told that Milpitas has “just the right air for wondering whether a thing had happened this way, or that way, or some third way not yet imagined, or perhaps not at all.” In a history of land use that could only happen in California, the house in Milpitas becomes a diner, then that diner becomes a newsstand, then that newsstand switches to selling hardcore pornography. When the porn store shuts down, a handful of teens become deeply attached to the unsecured former home of Monster Adult XL, which becomes part clubhouse, part art installation as they trash the store and its abandoned merchandise in the most creative way possible.
One of the teens, with nowhere else to call home, ends up living in the store—right about the time the landlord starts showing the place to prospective buyers. These incursions from the real world put the squatters on the defensive: “people, even and maybe especially young people, feel a need to guard the things and places they hold dear from becoming polluted.” The teens’ redecorating of the abandoned store takes up the occult aesthetic that will earn the Devil House its name: “all the blind-alley symbols and slogans . . . A GENERATION OF VAMPIRES; SORCERER CULT; SET 4 SACRIFICE . . . A silver pentagram in spray paint . . . letters from a Satanic alphabet.” Of course, all the devilry is just a psyop: “I hope they see this and think: Better just leave whoever did this shit alone.”
Still, two Official Californians end up dead. And this is where Chandler’s story has to fight the hardest to escape the real world’s gravitational pull, the facticity equally insisted upon by the state and the true crime regime. It’s one thing to pop true crime’s epistemic bubble (“It’s weird, he said, how many things you might swear to, right? When it was actually different from what you remember, when you don’t really know at all.”). It’s another thing to dispose of the mutilated human bodies. But then again, this is California: if you can’t beat them, outnarrate them.
Does God, like Darnielle’s unreliable narrator, ever spin the facts in our favor?
The narrative Chandler lands on is about castles and lost ages. Put enough time between the facts and the telling, and the story can rewrite itself completely. Take it from the historical King Arthur: “to you, he doesn’t look like what you mean by king, and his castle doesn’t look like a castle. . . . It looks, he said, like a dirt mound somebody piled up in a real hurry overnight to protect a very small group of people from attack.” The difference between some teens squatting in an abandoned porn store and the Knights of the Round is all just a matter of perspective: “a castle in which one finds shelter, be it the meanest dwelling in all the land, is home and hearth to those it guards from harm; and that the right of those within its walls remains, to defend themselves from the intruder.”
This is just one layer of a many-layered fiction, one strand in Darnielle’s meditation on truth and narration: “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?” For those familiar with Darnielle’s work as the songwriter for the Mountain Goats, the many resonances between this novel and his songs will add another layer of complexity. Because Chandler and Darnielle seem to have so many subjects and sensibilities in common, it’s hard not to read Gage’s character as an extended exercise in self-criticism: “I thought Gage had spent too long trying to save people he couldn’t save and that the effort had clouded his vision in one way but maybe clarified it in another.”
I’m an evangelist for Darnielle’s music and his other books, and this novel will be no exception. It’s a devious, challenging text for a non-Californian who prides himself on his membership in the reality-based community. My antipathy toward rent-seeking grifters and true-crime ghouls doesn’t extend to excusing homicide. When Chandler says, “[T]he idea that people might need to be protected from the facts of a case, it runs counter to what we’re taught,” I think, “Yes, and for good reason.” But when he says, “[I]t matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell,” I nod along to that too.
Free market, true crime: both are aspirations to a certain kind of objectivity, a certain God’s eye view. At the bottom of everything, there are The Facts—indifferent to the point of cruelty—and these forces are only too happy to dig up every infirmity or inquiry they contain. But is this really how God (“He who is our θεατής or beholder,” according to Gregory of Nyssa) sees us? Or does God, like Darnielle’s unreliable narrator, ever spin the facts in our favor? Should we?
One thing about the real world—it doesn’t need our help. The market will clear. Our sin will find us out. And yet, grace makes us nervous. We scrutinize the worthiness of the objects of our charity. We hold each other accountable. Devil House is a parable about this appetite for truth and justice that asks where along the way we lost the stomach for mercy.
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
Devil House was published by Macmillan on January 25, 2022. You can purchase a copy of your own on their website here.
