As with a lot of old buildings around here (including ANOTHER former “news and video” place just down the street from my house), I’d daydreamed a little about it-about using it as an office, or about opening my long-threatened soup restaurant in it. And then the developers came and razed literally that entire block, like there’s only grass there now, so that only memories and a photograph or two in civic records or old newspapers remains of this building whose final incarnation was somebody’s home-spun idea of running a porn store. It looked like something out of an early 70s photo essay on urban decay or something. A friend and I both happened to see it in the same week-this is well over ten years ago now-and were both kind of bowled over by how from-another-time it seemed. It had a hand-painted sign out front, like a sandwich board, that said MONSTER XXX.

Anyhow, the building in question sat on a strip of land with a few other buildings on it, and, for the short period of time I mentioned above, somebody was running a porn store out of it. It was an old building in the Golden Belt neighborhood, which is an old mill village-of course it’s all condominiums now, and was getting ready to trend in that direction when I started writing the book, so some of the book’s themes circle that, too: developers, the growth of cities often at the expense of many of their people.

This one was a physical location, a building here in Durham that seems only to have operated as a business for a very short period of time.

John Darnielle: Super good and interesting question-I’m always very interested in the beginnings of my books, in the departure point.

Darnielle devil house