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A review by harvestmoonshine
Devil House by John Darnielle
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
True confession - I love a pretentious book if it's done well. I wrote a thesis on Lolita. House of Leaves is one of my favorite works. Pretention can work and can be interesting and illuminating and complicating.
This book is so pretentious. And not in good ways. This is very much a guy who thinks he is the smartest guy in the room writing through the voice of a protagonist who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and trying to create layers and resonances in ways that come off as very self-involved and try hard. I'm also not quite sure what this wants to be - it's marketed as horror and moral panic, but it really isn't that. I appreciate that it is genre switching, but I don't feel like it ever establishes a clear identity (and don't even get me started on the identity/voice issue of the weird gothic font, medieval monster POV section).
I'm not saying there aren't any interesting threads in the novel - there are some questions about why we read true crime and what we want from it that are interesting. I think this came off even worse, though, because I just read Rebecca Makai's I Have Some Questions for You, which was a very interesting feminist interrogation of the true crime genre that laid the same tensions bare without all of the pretension and convolutedness present in this book.
This book is so pretentious. And not in good ways. This is very much a guy who thinks he is the smartest guy in the room writing through the voice of a protagonist who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and trying to create layers and resonances in ways that come off as very self-involved and try hard. I'm also not quite sure what this wants to be - it's marketed as horror and moral panic, but it really isn't that. I appreciate that it is genre switching, but I don't feel like it ever establishes a clear identity (and don't even get me started on the identity/voice issue of the weird gothic font, medieval monster POV section).
I'm not saying there aren't any interesting threads in the novel - there are some questions about why we read true crime and what we want from it that are interesting. I think this came off even worse, though, because I just read Rebecca Makai's I Have Some Questions for You, which was a very interesting feminist interrogation of the true crime genre that laid the same tensions bare without all of the pretension and convolutedness present in this book.