How much research is too much, and when does the search for truth become an obsession? The book also demonstrates how memories can be powerful yet fluid, open to different interpretations. Yet I don’t think it’s a criticism of true crime – rather it asks questions about the responsibilities of authors and the aftermath of wading into other people’s lives. A section containing the letter from a victim’s mother is a gut punch, lingering long after I was done.Īdmittedly I’m not the biggest fan of true crime because it can be exploitative and this book makes that particular point too. It made me feel as if I lived inside the characters’ heads. The detailed, stream-of-consciousness prose was persuasive and immersive. But it was entertaining, like solving a puzzle. There are first, second, and third-person POVs so sometimes I wasn’t sure who was telling the story at first. Like the author’s previous book Universal Harvester, this isn’t easy to digest. It gave me different perspectives on the stories. But I thought it was interesting how Part 7 is the other side of Part 1, Part 6 of 2, and so forth. I did find this part to be the weakest because it feels unfinished in its execution.

It’s reflected in the two cases and particularly in Part 4 an interlude of an Old English tale about kings that links to the writer’s royalty lineage. The running theme here is the use of “castle doctrine” where a person has the legal right to use deadly force to defend their home. Both crime scenes are gruesome and elaborately told. It’s mainly about two murder cases – a female teacher convicted of murdering two students in her house, and the unsolved murders of a landlord and a prospective house buyer in an abandoned adult shop. “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?”ĭevil House is a multilayered metafiction told in a nonlinear format divided into 7 parts. His research leads him back to his previous book about a local murder, and forces him to examine his own involvement. A true-crime writer moves into the notorious “Devil House” where two people were killed, reportedly by teens affiliated with a Satanic cult.

Book devil house