Devil House

This novel evaded my expectations all the way through until the last few pages. The main character is a writer of true crime books who moves into a building where a grisly double murder occurred in the 1980's, with the intent to investigate and write his next book about what really happened there. We learn that his first book, about a woman who killed her teenage attackers and inexplicably dismembered them and tried to throw their bodies in the ocean, was successful enough to be made into a movie. There is enough gruesome detail and enough inhabiting the lives of the people involved in these murders to be creepy, more than a little disturbing, but this book is definitely not horror. Nor is it exactly a mystery. True, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the Devil House murders and certainly the character of Gage Chandler wants to get at the truth, but it's not clear that the story is going to deliver on that.

Wherever it was going, I was willing to follow, though, even through some abrupt changes of perspective and style. This was a highly readable book. It had an aura of 1970's-‘80's nostalgia that drew me in, reminding me of the so-called “Satanic Panic” of my adolescence. There were some portrayals of adolescent and teenage friendship that were deep, nuanced, and very much of the time period that made the story irresistible to me. The end was not at all what I expected, but once I read it I could look back and see how the roots of the ending went far back into the book. It did not just pop out of nowhere.