From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him when he was a child. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and a movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell--his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research into the murders with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.

Devil House is John Darnielle's most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it's a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who've felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John Darnielle hears it through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes.

Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van.

A New York Times Bestseller
A Finalist for the Locus Award (Best Horror Novel)

A moving, beautifully etched picture of America's lost and profoundly lonely. --Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature

Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it's nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it's a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.
--Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times

Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread. --Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

The most unsettling book I've read since House of Leaves.
--Adam Morgan, Electric Literature

It's the late '90s, and you can find Jeremy Heldt at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa--a small town in the center of the state. The job is good enough for Jeremy, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a carwreck. But when a local school teacher comes in to return her copy of Targets--an old movie, starring Boris Karloff--the transaction jolts Jeremy out of his routine. There's something on it, she says as she leaves the store, though she doesn't elaborate. Two days later, another customer returns another tape, and registers the same odd complaint: There's another movie on this tape.

In Universal Harvester, the once-placid Iowa fields and farmhouses become sinister, imbued with loss and instability and foreboding. As Jeremy and those around him are absorbed into tapes, they become part of another story--one that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain.

Long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award in fiction
Winner of the 2015 Alex Award for adult books with special appeal for young adults

Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle's audacious and gripping debut novel Wolf in White Van is a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move.

Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian--a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail--Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America.

Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.

Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean's life.

The complete song lyrics of one of music's most visionary bards, John Darnielle.

A work of rapturous beauty, The Complete Lyricks, 2000-2025 celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of John Darnielle through his most meaningful songs.

From his early days recording on a boom box, through the evolution of the Mountain Goats from a solo project to a full band, to his continued influence on indie music, The Complete Lyricks pairs the definitive texts of tk John Darnielle songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his family and friends; his wife, Lalitree Darnielle; his longtime collaborator, Peter Hughes; and even his literary heroes, among many others. Here are the origins of This Year, No Children, The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, and Up the Wolves, as well as Darnielle's literary influences, including Flannery O'Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King.

The Complete Lyricks, spanning decades, becomes the definitive literary record of one of the greatest songwriters and musical creative forces of all time.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

It's never quite the book you think it is. It's better. --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and a movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell--his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.

Devil House is John Darnielle's most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.