Review of Devil House by John Darnielle
I have seldom felt so ill-used by a book.
Some of this can be laid at the feet of marketing because "horror" sounds more appealing than "pseudointellectual navel-gazed larded with vaporous flourishes of elegant, empty nonsense." The cover certainly seems to hint at horrors within, with its creepy manse whose shadow looks like a bat and its synopsis that whispers of unfathomable truths slowly, inexorably revealed. There is no reason to think it's not horror; it's even labeled as such on Goodreads and in library lookup systems.
Except that the only horror on view is the insufferable tedium of Darnielle's obsession with sacrificing the numerous kernels of tantalizing story in favor of showing off his l33t literary skills. Oh, you thought you were getting a small-town true crime story? Rube! Let me jump to this other small-town horror story instead. Oh, you were getting invested in that story? Gullible dolt! Have some nonsensical, Old English bafflegab in an eye-watering font instead! Because I'm smart, see? Smart enough to know Old English and its narrative conventions! What a clever boy am I!
But not smart enough to know the difference between present tense and preterite conjugations in Spanish, alas. If you're going to be insufferable and grating in the service of flaunting your obvious superiority, you should at least be correct about it.
I wanted to like this. Some of the prose was engrossing and had a dreamy, serene quality, and the hook of an unsolved crime in a small town was catnip. But there's only so much joy I can take in some pompous doofus prating about his amazing investigatory technique and ability to read people. Eventually, the story needs to progress, to fulfill the promise made in the early pages, but this one never does. It just spins in a morass of self-indulgence and peters out like a defective squib. There are no revelations and certainly no revelations to justify the time sunk into this excursion because...
None of it is true. It was all made up by Darnielle to make true crime readers feel bad for enjoying true crime book(but writers aren't equally awful for exploiting and profiting off that enjoyment, oh, dear, no). The mysteries and characters you invested in and waded through 400 pages never existed. Ha ha! Don't you feel stupid? Wasn't I so brilliant?
Twists like this can work if the author has established trust with the reader, and has worked to tell a good story through which to thread his social commentary. Darnielle did neither of these things; instead, he engaged in egotistic intellectual masturbation for 400 pages and expected us to gawp in awe in the soporific afterglow.
He can shove his pretension where the sun don't shine and hope it passes with the next quinoa smoothie.