The Milpitas of old holds valued real estate within Darnielle’s formative memories: “Milpitas would have been the second place I ever heard urban legends…” For example, he’d hear tall tales of some local lady whose leg had grown to 40 times its original size.
“It became a much bigger town that I haven’t seen,” he shared, saying Milpitas was at one time “a very small outpost of San Jose.” “It became a much different place than what it was,” Darnielle recalled. “There was a 7-inch single of the theme song you could buy in record stores or department stores…It’s sort of an electric moment that is hard to imagine on this side of the internet.”īack in the 70s, the Ford Motor plant was the town’s main employer, prior to the tech age. When I told him The Beat screened “The Milpitas Monster” back before the pandemic, Darnielle yelled out, “I’m starstruck!” He remembers one of the neighbor kids having known every single thing about the movie. “The theater was full,” Darneille recalled. During that brief revisit, he saw “The Milpitas Monster” in the movie theater. He attended second grade at Burnett Elementary School, then later came back briefly when his mom and stepdad had to clear out the stepdad’s house. It’s the Milpitas of the mid-1970s, when Darnielle’s family briefly lived here: “We lived in Milpitas right when they were building the freeway,” he recalled.
He explained that “Devil House” has seven parts for Parts 1, 3, 5, and sections of 6, the story is set in Milpitas. Darnielle, who founded the band The Mountain Goats, was getting ready to leave for a European tour. The Beat got a chance to speak with the bestselling author by phone early last week. Since then, The Beat’s heard whispers about it from varied corners we soon came to learn it takes place partially in Milpitas… “Devil House,” the new literary novel by John Darnielle about a true crime author who gains an edge by inhabiting the spaces where crimes took place, came out in January of this year from MCD.
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