![]() ![]() Where his prior novels turned inward, Devil House looks out on the world. “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive,” Darnielle sings on “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1.” “Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away.” His characters might not make the best choices, but they haven’t been given many options. He has themed albums around epic fantasy and regional wrestling circuits, and his books are filled with outmoded, tactile pursuits: snail-mail role-playing games, small-town video stores, true crime paperbacks picked up at mall bookshops. But Darnielle is rarely voyeuristic he gets inside his characters, exhibiting their passions as much as their pain. ![]() His songs tell the stories of those on the losing end of transactions both daily and disastrous: mental ward patients and group home inmates, extinct species and characters from Scarface. Over the past 30 years, Darnielle has used the Mountain Goats to expound a sort of small-scale, lo-fi humanism. Darnielle, who is best known for his band the Mountain Goats, made his literary debut in 2008 with a volume on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality in the 33 1/3 series, and in 2014 published the National Book Award–nominated novel Wolf in White Van. ![]()
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