Devil House

by John Darnielle

I was good at telling stories when I was a kid. It became a habit.

I’ve been writing about crimes ever since: the crimes people tell stories about, and the secret ones our stories seek to conceal.

That was the night when, for the first time, I knocked on a stranger’s door to ask if they’d let me inside, and the night I stumbled across my method, which, like anything else in the world, I guess, has both good points and bad.

My interests lay underneath a surface in whose anticipated permanence people were investing time, and money.

keepsakes are just memory-prompts, and you don’t really need them if you have a good memory. Mine is excellent.

I was almost entirely wrong. There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective. “Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes. I’m sure of this now. Live and learn.

PEOPLE BRING EXPECTATIONS to the site of a massacre. It can’t be helped.

But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.

But teaching your children to take care of themselves and letting them do it are two different things. The former is a long labor of patience, and focus, and forbearance. The latter requires skills you never have time to learn when you’re busy practicing patience, maintaining focus, and picking battles.

What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?