Insofar as he’s rooting for the teens against the monster, Darnielle is taking sides against “reality” itself. Insofar as there’s a monster in this book, it’s the California real estate market. It’s Darnielle’s second entry in a sparsely populated genre I might describe as anti-horror-the spooky stuff is mostly misdirection. Besides which you have Official California, where a place belongs to whoever has the proper paperwork.ĭevil House is about this Californian civil war, with a ragtag band of teens straight from central (out)casting to play the partisans of the Dream State. But then there are at least two Californias, and the late Queen Joan of Sacramento speaks for only one of them: the endlessly expanding, self-mythologizing Californian dreamscape. In his fourth novel, John Darnielle makes a case for this distinctly Californian take on property rights. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,” wrote Joan Didion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |