![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Some of his fame comes from his first book, The White Witch of Moro Bay, which explored and recontextualised the murder of two young men by their female teacher in his home town in the early 1970s, and was later made into a fairly successful movie. He writes books about ‘the crimes people tell stories about, and the secret ones our stories seek to conceal’. Gage Chandler is a fairly successful true crime author. Ostensibly the story of a true crime writer working on his latest project, Darnielle flips the script in the back half of the novel to deconstruct and critique the true crime genre and the act of storytelling itself. Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House, does something similar. Universal Harvester used nascent horror tropes in its early pages but turned into something more profound and compassionate. Both these books took situations and plots that seemed familiar, and turned them on their heads. John Darnielle may be best known as the lead singer of the American indie folk rock band the Mountain Goats, but he is also the author of two previous novels, Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester. In John Darnielle’s new novel, a true crime writer confronts the limits of the genre. ![]()
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