When John Darnielle is not churning out albums with The Mountain Goats—or dispensing advice on podcasts, or chatting with poets—he’s churning out novels. Earlier today, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced the upcoming release of new Darnielle’s new novel Devil House, and the reveal of the cover, which, as far as book covers go, is really striking. (It gave me In Cold Blood vibes.)

The Mountain Goats’ latest record, Dark In Here, was released in June. 

Anyone that listens to The Mountain Goats knows that Darnielle’s art is all shaped around storytelling, so it’s no surprise that his writing career has been as successful as it has been.

In 2014, he published the National Book Award-nominated Wolf In a White Van, which was followed in 2016 with Universal Harvester, which also had a phenomenal cover, and which The New York Times described as a book that, “If it were a video, you might find it in the horror aisle, dropped there by a pimply clerk unsure where else to put it.” The INDY measured it as a novel that you could “read in the time it takes a house wren to set up shop inside a gourd, which is about half a day.” So, there you go.

Devil House, which will release on January 25, 2022, looks to follow in the horror-genre path of Darnielle’s two previous novels. Promotional copy describes the new book as “an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, artistic obsession” about a writer who is “offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house—what the locals call ‘The Devil House’—in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred in 1980s, apparently the work of disaffected teens.” 

The book’s website lists The Regulator in Durham as a place where you can pre-order signed copies. 

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Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.