The works of John Darnielle
‘Wolf in White Van’, ‘Universal Harvester’ and ‘Devil House’, all by – that’s correct – The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.
The fear is that you’ll hurt someone. One day things will be normal, and the next somebody will be dead because some hidden monster rose up inside you and you lost control. The compulsions are a safety mechanism to keep whatever your potential for evil is in check.
The nightmare scenario is that it’s too late, that you have already snapped, that you have forgotten. There are compulsions for that, too.
The circular, intrusive thoughts, the endless analysis of what you have done or might do, and the persistent urge to check thoughts and memories for your sins propagate and thrive on uncertainty. In real life most things are shades of grey, but with OCD it can only ever feel black and white. You are either a villain in the making, or you are innocent as a newborn baby. The manifestation of OCD is an attempt to determine which.
A lot of this just looks like fiction. Most of what we do in literature is an attempt to understand the human condition and our debts to one another, and so it makes sense for us to linger on guilt. There are so many ways people can hurt each other.
The question of who is responsible for particular harms, and to what degree, forms the backbone of all three of the Mountain Goats singer and songwriter John Darnielle’s novels. In his debut Wolf in White Van, a solitary man grapples with his part in sending two star-crossed teenagers to their death in the American wilderness. In Universal Harvester, from 2017, a young man in 1990s Iowa takes it upon himself to seek out the person responisble for splicing disturbing home videos into rented VHS tapes. And in his most recent novel, 2022’s Devil House, a mercenary author moves into the building where a pair of murders occurred many years before, prompting him to reappraise the meaning of his life’s work.
In every book, Darnielle returns to the question of guilt. More specifically, his books prod at the line between art and artist, asking: are we responsible for the damage our art wreaks on the world?
This is not a question of whether or not we can cut an abusive or bigoted artist away from their creations like a fatty tumor, but of what we owe each other, and what we have done to each other without looking.
For someone with OCD, this dilemma could easily spiral into lost days, lost weeks. The fear of having unknowingly caused harm looms large in many people’s lives, and is often accompanied by its future-tense twin; what damage might I do later?
The problem at the heart of all this is that you can never know for sure. OCD thrives in the grey zone of memory and causes you to doubt what really happened. It prods at you over and over again and asks, are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? And then you are not sure, because the more you take a memory out and examine it, the more it degrades.
It is so easy to splice in a memory that is not our own. To mistake one image for another. The more it seems to change, the less you can trust it. The less you can trust yourself.
It is debilitating. What have I done? What will I do? What am I capable of?
In Wolf in White Van, John Darnielle gives us a portrait of a man who walked to the very edge of the big, awful thing he feared he was capable of, and then takes him to the other side of that line, into the ‘after’. Sean, the protagonist, lives a life greatly reduced. Simultaneously isolated inside his own guilt and held at a distance by the general public, who judge and fear him based on his facial scarring, he spends most days moderating Trace Italian, the mail-based strategy game he invented. Trace Italian has a small cast of dedicated fans, and as the book unfolds it becomes clear that for one high school couple the line between the game and the real world has blurred.
The teens’ families believe that this is Sean’s fault. Nobody else, Sean included, seams really sure either way. Because of the harm and near-harm in his past – and maybe because of historical tropes around facial difference and morality – it is presumed that Sean must be to blame for the teenagers disappearing inside his game. He made it, after all. Even after the resulting court case is resolved, we linger inside this presumption. Guilt, it seems, is lifelong.
The ruminations on Sean’s guilt might be triggered by a past truth, but they are obsessive in their frequency. Similar to people with OCD, Sean has developed strategies to block out what he calls the ‘tape loops’ running in his head – insurance against the flashbacks and his own mental questioning. Or; compulsions.
We often think of compulsions as a light switch going off-on-off-on-off, or an unlit stove checked exactly seventeen times, but they’re just as often internal. Did I do that? Was it bad? Am I sure?
Am I sure? Am I sure?
The other side of this coin is an attempt to neutralise. Like Sean’s strategies, this may take the form of a refusal to think about the obsession to a destabilising degree, or the need to replace a ‘bad’ thought with a ‘good’ one. Neutralising the thought brings the obsessive brain relief, and so the next time it is under stress it serves up the flashback again, so that it can be neutralised and again experience relief. The sins are not washed away, but churning out of sight.
Perhaps the image that chimes most with the experience of harm OCD comes in the book’s opening paragraphs – on the very first page of John Darnielle’s very first novel. Recalling the times when his father would carry him down the hall to his bedroom after his return from hospital as a teenager, Sean observes that, ‘It’s a cluster memory now: it consists of every time it has happened and is recalled in a continuous loop.’
‘After a while,’ Darnielle writes, ‘the scene blurred into inumerable intechangeable identical scenes layered on top of the other like transparencies.’
The image stacks and then degrades. The story changes.
In both Devil House and Universal Harvester, the story changes through deliberate intervention. Universal Harvester, arguably the most ambigously constructed of Darnielle’s works, rotates around a set of tampered-with video tapes cropping up in the American midwest.
The anthology of spliced-in scenes becomes a rallying cry, a calling-card and a threat. Like uncertain memories or intrusive thoughts, the tapes’ true meanings are elusive. When he learns about them, Video Hut employee Jeremy spends hours watching and rewatching the tapes, rewinding and fast-forwarding, trying to understand where they came from and what they mean. He has a strange sense of duty about it, as if he alone will be responsible for whatever damage the tapes wreak if he doesn’t figure out what’s going on.
Jeremy didn’t make the tapes and yet now that he’s seen them, he feels a sense of ownership over them. If he suspsects something dangerous is happening, and he looks away, he will be guilty. This is at the heart of OCD logic. Not only do we believe we can prevent or correct harm by performing compulsions, but that we must. As if one person with OCD is the single line of defence against whatever evils are in the world.
John Darnielle’s last two books have both been referred to as puzzles, leaving deliberate blank space for the reader to fall into or work around. Like Eliza Clark’s Penance or Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story, Devil House uses the conceit of a true crime writer at work to expose the way that these stories are constructed from fallible collective memory. Narrator Gage Chandler’s career peaked with his first, grisly true crime book The White Witch of Morro Bay, which was an instant bestseller and later turned into a film. After several more lacklustre efforts, he moves into the titular Devil House in Milpitas, California under the premise of writing about a double murder that took place there in the mid-80s. As he writes and researches his next book, Gage starts to reevaluate his life’s work and its effects on the community.
The issue of harm in Devil House is different from that of Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester, in that it spills out to a societal level. Gage’s ethical situation is murky, but it also implicates his editor, Ashton – who, Gage notes, has a habit of ‘talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences’ – as well as the locals in Milpitas, the media, and anyone else involved in perpetetuating the 1980s Satanic Panic. And that’s before we even get to whoever it was that’s responsible for the murders in the first place.
What it does have in common with the other books is a central theme of memory and intepretation. The truth of the murders mutates through the late 20th century, and twists again when Gage gets his hands on it in the early 2000s. The story initially seems to ring true, a complex yet understandable web of human fallibility. Then, of course, the questions start. This time it’s not a question of proving ones’ innocence, but rather trusting in someone else’s guilt. Do we believe the story as it has been told to us? And if we don’t, if the story is wrong, then what does that say about the people who told it?
In all three of these books, it ultimately hardly matters whether the characters are truly guilty of anything. They respond not to external forces – the law, for example, or even a social contract – but to their own internal perceptions of harm. For whatever reason, they feel responsible. OCD can be like this, too. At a functional level, self-constructed guilt feels indistinguishable from the real thing. You feel guilty, therefore you are. The only question is: guilty of what?
Of the human potential to cause harm?
The solution, such as it is, mirrors the construction of John Darnielle’s novels. The white space is essential. By refusing to deal in absolutes, we loosen their grasp. The answer to the question ‘what harm might I be capable of?’ can only ever be ‘I don’t know’. In Wolf in White Van, Universal Harvester and Devil House, we get a sense of what accommodating that uncertainty might look like.