Book reviews

John Darnielle

Devil House

MCD X FSG

America loves a good murder.

Maybe we’ve always been this way, but sometime in the past few years, true crime evolved from guilty pleasure to passionate obsession. People discuss “blood spatter” and “Munchausen by proxy” with the same amateur enthusiasm once used to dissect Tarantino dialogue or the Cubs’ dubious playoff hopes. Once the lurid domain of sleazy tabloids, true crime has become gleefully, gruesomely bingeable entertainment, from Netflix docuseries to murderino podcasts to New York Times best-sellers describing mayhem both historical and contemporary.

John Darnielle’s upcoming novel, Devil House, invites the reader to reconsider this fascination. Protagonist Gage Chandler is a true crime author who finds his next grisly subject in a news clipping about a 15-year-old murder in Milpitas, California: “The few choice bits were tantalizing enough—dead bodies atop a pyre of pornography, cryptograms in graffiti, the spectre of teenage Satanic rites jolting a sleepy town awake.”

When he learns the house where the murders took place is for sale, Chandler buys it and moves in, the better to absorb and understand the horror he struggles to relate: “I moved into this house to tell a story,” he narrates. “... to inhabit the carapace of the crime scene, to retrace the steps of the killer in order to better know his path.”

The teenagers caught up in the horrific murder Chandler is attempting to retell would find themselves at home on the 2002 Mountain Goats album All Hail West Texas. Darnielle’s ability to evoke characters who are both flawed and sympathetic—characters to root for even though we understand they are doomed—is clear whether he’s writing lyrics or prose. Devil House’s Jesse and Gene in many ways embody a worst-case scenario version of Cyrus and Jeff from the song “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton.”

As Chandler digs into the truth of the crime that brought him to the Devil House, the conflict between the complex reality of the human experience and the reductive caricature of a true crime narrative becomes a sort of torture. Is it possible to write about the worst moment in a person’s life without reducing that life and the multitudes it contained to a single-dimensional identity: victim or murderer; monster or prey?

Darnielle’s genius maneuver is to both enable and challenge America’s murderphilia. Chandler’s obsessive research allows him to reconstruct visceral details, like a killer “sawing through cartilage, breathing through flared nostrils oblivious to the stench,” indulging our bloodlust, only to complicate that understanding by conjuring complicated, vulnerable individuals as they were before a single moment transformed them.

When Darnielle announced the launch of Devil House, he called it “a novel about stories and who gets to tell them.” What Chandler, and the reader, must ultimately confront is that when we talk True Crime, it is never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And often as not, any truth those stories tell is more about the teller than the story.

Devil House will be released on Jan. 25. Please remember to support independent booksellers when adding it to your library.

—Adam Witte

Various authors, Ed. Becca Klaver

Midwinter Constellation

BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS

Midwinter Constellation is the collaborative effort of 32 poets paying homage to Midwinter Day, by Bernadette Mayer, on the 40th anniversary of its creation. It is the brainchild of editor Becca Klaver who states in the afterword that she created this virtual space to be transparent and collaborative, following the “six-part structure of Bernadette Mayer’s epic of dailiness.” Constellation’s sections are divided into dreams, morning, noontime, afternoon, evening, night.

Before reading Midwinter Constellation I had to read Midwinter Day. And before reading Midwinter Day, I wanted to understand its significance to contemporary American poetry—everyone I knew in literature spent this past December preparing to celebrate the epic poem, designing a fundraiser for its creator.

The impact that Mayer releases in 119 pages is a subtle and slow burn, the story of a day resonating far beyond 1978, causing generations of poets and readers like me to acknowledge that there is meaning in the domestic, a spark of life in the things we take for granted. As with Mayer’s shifting format and language (sometimes rambling, sometimes concise and biting), the 32 women who pay tribute in Constellation match pitch, passion and tone as each section nods to its inspiration.

There is a magic to the original, and Klaver and Co. (as credited on the spine), with their deep connection to it, manage to capture that same lightning in this new bottle. “The wisdom of Mayer choosing the winter solstice as the day for her project is revealed throughout our homage: it’s not only the shortest day of the year, but also one with an appealing mix of ordinariness and specialness,” Klaver notes, again in her afterword. “Is this the daily or a holiday? I find myself wondering as I reread our book. The answer is that here, again, is the epic everyday.”

I want to say that Constellation breathes new life into Midwinter Day, but that isn’t quite right. Learning the original text earlier this month, I was surprised to find how little it had aged since its conception. More accurately, what Constellation does renew its source material. In 2018, with all the technology and all the obligations of the world only having increased, we see more clearly that the issues Mayer discussed (shopping malls, parenting, wilderness) are ongoing—but we see them from more perspectives, which here coalesce.

There is no clear delineation between writers, the flow is seamless as it mirrors Mayer’s verse, as with this stanza from the Morning section, which likely resonates more universally upon the release of the publication than it may have when it was written: “Being far away from everyone you love / starts as personal novelty / ends as cultural condition.”

Beyond paying homage to Midwinter Day and Bernadette Mayer specifically (Klaver notes that the name “Bernadette” is used 25 times throughout the text, often appearing as a character), the contributing poets are also revering the written word itself, to the creative process. “Driving and listening to music is writing / just as for Bernadette / tape-recording and taking / pictures and making / spaghetti and dancing / to the Talking Heads / was writing.”

Klaver sums up the ambitious project simply: “It took thirty-two of us to prove again what Mayer already showed: if you heed one day closely enough, you will transcend the illusion that somehow our individual lives are ours alone.”

—Sarah Elgatian