In a blur of long afternoons and sleepless nights, Derrick and Seth transform the shop into a combination of clubhouse and installation art project alongside their friends Alex and Angela. Seth’s imagination begins to run wild, cycling through the possibilities made tangible by a secret space of their own, beyond the province of adult eyes. When the porn store shuts down, Derrick invites Seth to check out the abandoned storefront. Derrick is applying to colleges - his mother keeps leaving brochures out on the kitchen table, carefully arranging them to look casually placed - but his childhood buddy Seth is facing a less certain future: he’s a good kid, bright and creative, but has never been able to apply himself in school.
It’s 1986 in Milpitas, California, and Derrick’s interactions with his friends and classmates seem to crackle with the weight of a new disequilibrium - adulthood, or something close to it, lingers on the horizon, rendering every bike ride home along the scenic route or whispered conversation in the back of Spanish class oddly bittersweet. He even has a part-time job (albeit a secret one working the cash register at the local porn store). (Jan.Derrick Hall is about as well-adjusted as a teenager can be: affable, responsible, even willing to indulge his parents’ sentimentality as the fall of his senior year flashes by. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company. It operates perfectly on many levels, resulting in a must-read for true crime addicts and experimental fiction fans alike. This masterwork of suspense is as careful with its sharp takes as it is with the bread crumbs it slowly drops on the way to its stunning end.
Gage’s multilayered narrative of the Devil House murders slowly builds from conjecture to the victims’ ventriloquized voices, lending itself well to Darnielle’s themes about the artifice of the genre: “Formalities, when carefully tended, quietly congregate to make form,” Gage notes. Interspliced with Gage’s investigation are long excerpts from one of his previous books, The White Witch of Morro Bay, which recounts the gruesome end for two teenage boys who broke into their teacher’s apartment. True crime writer Gage Chandler has spent the last five years living in the “Devil House” in Milpitas, Calif., where he’s been working on a book about an unsolved murder that took place there in 1986, during the height of the Satanic Panic. In this riveting metafictional epic, Mountain Goats singer-songwriter Darnielle ( Universal Harvester) flays the conventions of true crime to reveal the macabre and ordinary brutality behind sensationalized stories of violence.
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