Devil House

Gage Chandler writes true crime. One of his books has been a success and has been made into a film, and he has built his name on treating victims with care. Now he is offered a new project with an irresistible setup: he can move into a house in Milpitas, California, where two murders took place on Halloween 1986.

The building was once a porn shop, and its walls were covered in occult imagery during the Satanic Panic.

Gage sets about the research the way he always has, diligently and with a stated respect for the dead. But the case pulls him toward his own childhood and toward questions about how he works. He starts to see something rotten at the centre of the genre he practises.

The book is a literary novel, and its form loosens as his grip on the story slips. Other voices break in, among them a letter from a grieving mother and a second-person account of a woman's last innocent hours.

These interruptions ask who true crime is written for and what it costs the people it describes. Expect something ambitious and unsettling rather than a procedural. It is a novel about storytelling and memory, and about the harm that can be done in the name of understanding.