When voice actor Heath Miller sits down in his boatshed-turned-home studio in Maine to record a new audiobook narration, he has already read the text through carefully at least once. To deliver his best performance, he takes notes on each character and any hints of how they should sound. Over the past two years, audiobook roles, like narrating popular fantasy series He Who Fights With Monsters, have become Miller’s main source of work. But in December he briefly turned online detective after he saw a tweet from UK sci-fi author Jon Richter disclosing that his latest audiobook had no need for the kind of artistry Miller offers: It was narrated by a synthetic voice.
I met Death in my early twenties. I had already lost loved ones before this time. A friend at school was taken by leukemia in a breathtaking six weeks one strange, hot summer. My grandfather, Eric, and my uncle, Tim, both died before their time.
But none of us truly meets Death until we are ready to understand what it means. My first meeting came while sitting in a recording studio with a Holocaust survivor called Hannah.1 Hannah had endured the death march from her home in Hungary when she was fifteen years old. In 1944, she and her family were transported by cattle truck to Auschwitz. Out of dozens of family members, only she and her brother came through the war alive.
To some, an origin story of humanity that’s rooted deeply in carnivory seems to point toward some long-lost masculine ideal that humans owe their very existence to their lust for blood and meat. In reality, the emerging evidence is a little more complex than that. Meat-eating may have evolved alongside a host of other behaviors that unleashed the power of our larger brains and set us down the path to complex language and societies. “Maybe meat made us human not just because we were eating it, but because of the social stuff we were doing around it,” says Merritt. “Rather than asking ‘did meat make us human?’ I would like to know how meat made us human.”
Should I go? Last summer I’d agreed to deliver the toast to Sherlock Holmes at the annual banquet of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York. But as Friday, Jan. 4, approached, the omicron variant was, as they say, raging. Still, I’d been boosted and everyone attending was required to present proof of vaccination. How, then, could I let the team down?
Happily, I didn’t get sick and tested negative after returning home. Perhaps it wasn’t happenstance that the Westin Hotel on East 42nd Street, where most Irregulars were staying, is directly across from the Pfizer World Headquarters. Signs on its building proclaimed, “Science Will Win.”
John Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House, is a fascinating hybrid of gothic horror, the true crime format, and something stranger. It’s keenly attuned to how people change, how we bring our pasts with us, how the spaces we enter shape us, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes violently. The novel is intensely (if circuitously) invested in the condition of narration—who is speaking, why are they speaking, what are they getting out of it? It’s a picture of someone refusing to tell a story they’re already committed to tell, that they’re complicit in and profiting from. While I expected bloody twists and turns, the kinds of twists and turns this novel threw at me were intoxicating.
Some readers familiar with the mystery genre will likely guess quite a few of the twists as they're signaled pretty early on, but the journey there is nevertheless fun—and, occasionally, squelchy and gruesome, in just the right amount for a gothic love story.
From depictions of casual misogyny to distressing scenes of public shaming, mistreatment and torture, the novel shows the terrifying social forces that strip vulnerable people of dignity and render them animal-like. It's a searing meditation on the meaning of dignity in a dehumanizing world.