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