And, you know, when you’re young and angry and over-edgy, you get something of a charge from how bizarre the whole world of crime seems, how disruptive and norm-violating. I did, a little-and I used to read a lot of true crime, especially back in my library-stacks-haunting days as a lost young man-in the pre-Internet time, you had to do a lot of legwork to learn the grisly details, and there was a sort of status economy in knowing more about it than other people who were into the same thing, in having a more accurate version of stories that circulated mainly as legends. I’m thinking you must have spent some interesting time dwelling on true crime culture. All that in addition to how it will be received. (I will never open the soup restaurant, it’s just something I like to think about.) So I thought about a writer setting up shop in a shady former porn store, and I gave him a name, and then I thought a little about his name, and it kind of grew from there.ĭid you dive into the world of true crime ‘fandom’ (for lack of a better word) for the research? Gage has such an ambivalent relationship with his work in that space: a highly refined sense of what the stories demand of him, but also a growing dread at his own inclination to give it. As with a lot of old buildings around here (including ANOTHER former “news and video” place just down the street from my house), I’d daydreamed a little about it-about using it as an office, or about opening my long-threatened soup restaurant in it.

And then the developers came and razed literally that entire block, like there’s only grass there now, so that only memories and a photograph or two in civic records or old newspapers remains of this building whose final incarnation was somebody’s home-spun idea of running a porn store. It looked like something out of an early 70s photo essay on urban decay or something. A friend and I both happened to see it in the same week-this is well over ten years ago now-and were both kind of bowled over by how from-another-time it seemed. It had a hand-painted sign out front, like a sandwich board, that said MONSTER XXX.

Anyhow, the building in question sat on a strip of land with a few other buildings on it, and, for the short period of time I mentioned above, somebody was running a porn store out of it. It was an old building in the Golden Belt neighborhood, which is an old mill village-of course it’s all condominiums now, and was getting ready to trend in that direction when I started writing the book, so some of the book’s themes circle that, too: developers, the growth of cities often at the expense of many of their people.

This one was a physical location, a building here in Durham that seems only to have operated as a business for a very short period of time. John Darnielle: Super good and interesting question-I’m always very interested in the beginnings of my books, in the departure point.

Devil house a novel