John Darnielle, the singer-songwriter of cult indie rock favourites the Mountain Goats, has a way with words. Fans hear in his lyrics whatever they feel but can’t express. Among the ones I have heard roared back to him at gigs: “People say friends don’t destroy one another, what do they know about friends?” “I actually think that they’re not your friends if they destroy you,” he tells me from his home in Durham, North Carolina. “But the function of a line like that is that, well, that’s how it feels sometimes.” Recording as the Mountain Goats since 1991, Darnielle, 55, has made 20 studio albums under that name, the most recent being last year’s Dark in Here. He has also, for the past decade, been writing novels. It is a jump few singer-songwriters manage, but Wolf in White Van (2014), his first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has called his work “beautifully etched”. Darnielle’s third novel, Devil House, is published this month. It follows Gage Chandler, a true-crime writer said to be descended from kings, as he immerses himself in a murder case that took place at the eponymous Devil House, in the California town of Milpitas. Darnielle, who was born in Indiana but grew up in California, lived in Milpitas as a child. While the dark underbelly of the golden west chronicled by his foremost stylistic influence, Joan Didion, would appear to be front and centre in Devil House, Darnielle says he actually used gentler childhood memories – such as the bayside restaurant that housed a seal called Sam – for the book. Devil House skewers our current lust for true crime, but the idea for the novel emerged when Darnielle heard about “castle doctrine”, a “very old law that presently is being used by American gun enthusiasts to mean that I get to shoot you if you step on to my property and I’m scared of you”. Once it was a statute that made it legal for kings to kill anyone in their castle. A reader of medieval English chroniclers such as Thomas Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Darnielle started with a character who has always been told he’s descended from kings and went from there. His urge to dig back into the history of castle doctrine was partly political. Darnielle says the way it is being used in the US today is “all about giving white people an excuse to shoot black people”, and that this demanded interrogation. “My politics, in American terms, are far left,” he tells me. “It just seems clear, I think, to anybody, that the problems we are facing societally aren’t going to be solved by the free market.” Darnielle and his wife, Lalitree, who works for an academic publisher, have two children, Roman, 10, and Moses, seven. After Darnielle became a father, he wondered how it was possible that one in four women in the US return to work within two weeks of giving birth. “And the answer is – because Samuel Beckett saw this coming – you’re just going to keep doing it,” he says. “You ask what it’s like to be an American. And it’s like living in any sort of Terry Gilliam-like world, where you go: ‘There’s too many things to be mad about, and there’s only one me, so perhaps I’ll read a little Tolstoy.’” For Darnielle, “the most good for the most people seems like a good principle. In America you can’t say that without people saying: ‘So then you are apologising for Stalin!’ which I’m not,” he laughs. In fact, Darnielle grew up with a stepfather he describes as “a Stalin apologist”, a member of the Communist party with whom he had a complicated relationship. In 2005, the Mountain Goats released The Sunset Tree, an album that told the story of Darnielle’s abusive childhood. In the liner notes, Darnielle wrote that the album was “made possible by my stepfather, Mike Noonan (1940-2004): may the peace which eluded you in life be yours now”. The record was dedicated to young victims of abuse. “To me, the first thing that’s true about him is that he hit his wife and child,” Darnielle says today of his stepfather. “That’s the most important fact about him. But also, I wouldn’t even be acquainted with these progressive values without this guy.” The Sunset Tree, Darnielle says, “chooses not to try to present too much of that side of the picture because I’m sharing my story in the hopes that it helps other people. My first impulse when he died was to share that feeling of liberation. You know, that was the feeling I had: the guy who used to hit you will never do it again.” Darnielle’s parents separated when he was five and from his father, a Catholic jazz musician, he got something else that anchors his worldview: Christianity. Twice in our conversation, Darnielle says we are living in a “post-Dover Beach world”, referencing Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem. “The sea of faith has receded, and we all suspect – the most believing God-believing among us – has a deep suspicion that there’s nothing out there. That this is it. That we are an accident,” he says. And yet Darnielle prays to Jesus Christ and sometimes does a bit of Hare Krishna chanting. “My wife’s in the next room having to bite through her lip because she hates this whole shtick to pieces,” he says at the end of a CS Lewis-inspired disquisition on faith and emotion. “I see her point, which is: you just like it because it makes you cry. And it’s true! I’m a person who likes to ferret out something beautiful that makes me cry.” Able to apply this kind of critical thinking to himself, Darnielle can exercise it on his peers. “One of my longstanding tendencies is calling nostalgia toxic poison,” he says. “I cannot stand to hear people say how much better anything was when they were young. Because what was better, was that you were young.” As a novelist, he says, he feels young, and while on the one hand he aspires to be like Donna Tartt and “be read for centuries to come”, on the other he likes to “imagine my work being forgotten. And then later, somebody saying: ‘You know who was kind of cool? This guy who’s out of print.’”