![]() But that past begins to gnaw at Gage as he becomes more aware of how the genre demands archetypes that cheapen human loss: “I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money.” So the novel becomes a kind of critique of the form, as Darnielle (and Gage) imagines the crime victims (and ideas of victimhood) in more nuanced ways. Experience has taught Gage how to write about a case like this: His first book, about a teacher who killed two students in self-defense, became a modestly successful film. The center and main narrator of the novel is Gage, an author who’s moved to Milpitas, California, as a kind of stunt: He plans to live on the site of an unsolved double murder that took place on Halloween 1986 in an abandoned porn shop that was defaced with occult imagery. So this smart, twisty novel about true-crime books and the 1980s “Satanic panic” is a fine fit for him and his best so far. ![]() A true-crime author researches a mass-murder case that prompts him to reconsider his line of work.ĭarnielle has an affection for the dark side of pop culture and the way fans of supposedly gloom-and-doom genres like heavy metal and horror are more sophisticated than they get credit for. ![]()
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