The side effects of that are considerable, of casting things as narratives that may or may not have a tidy narrative. It’s like Joan Didion’s line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s a big beacon for me. That’s sort of how I feel about storytelling. The forms of entertainment that we have developed seem like they’re meeting some needs that we’re not getting met elsewhere. JD: Our need to be entertained is, I don’t want to say it’s pathological, but it is a little weird. There’s a sense in which any act of writing implicates people. When you are telling stories, there are often real lives involved. Tell me about the thematic connection there. I think it’s fascinating that Devil House is largely set in an abandoned porn shop.

HT: There’s a sense of voyeurism that goes into all forms of storytelling. And those are issues in play, but they’re not unique to true crime. You’re doing so in order to publish your book, maybe you’re doing it to educate, but also you’re probably getting paid for it. In true crime, you’re writing about crimes that had profound effects on people. John Darnielle: The book is not a critique of true crime-it stands in place of storytelling generally. Harry Todd: I get the sense that you’ve got some complicated feelings about true crime. More than anything, Darnielle was eager to dig into the ethical questions of storytelling, and how readers might just be implicated in the true crimes they love to read. He is a detailed and generous speaker, as willing to share the details of his Magic: The Gathering deck as he is to talking about the abstractions of storytelling. Speaking to Darnielle over the phone felt eerily similar to reading Devil House. In telling the story of this unsolved crime, is Gage committing an act of violence in itself? No convictions were made in the case, even if those high schoolers that turned the scene into a Satanist art installation before fleeing fit the bill almost too cleanly. Searching for the truth behind a decades-old double homicide, Chandler moves into the Devil House itself, a former porn shop-turned-crime scene whose notoriety has been glossed over with a fresh coat of paint and new floors.

The devil's house book