Author Archives: Justin Evans

Or: “Every Good Plagiarist Deserves Favour”: I first heard the Byron poem “Darkness” in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia, which is now on Broadway. Funny to hear all the “Lord B” references on radio promos and reviews. The Times loved it. The New Yorker hated it. What I regret is that the scene about “Darkness” [...]

Sometimes when I was working on the ms, my inner book critic would pipe up and say: “Only someone who went to college in New York, in the 1980s, could have written this book.” This was mid-late period AIDS crisis, the phase where, rather belatedly, everyone was being educated about it. And as a college [...]

The White Devil Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans’s gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father’s generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni [...]

“THE WHITE DEVIL is part ghost story, part murder mystery, part  coming-of-age tale, part romance. It’s a delightful cocktail: Justin Evans gets the balance just right. His writing is crisp, his storytelling vigorous, his sense of the uncanny pitch perfect. And he’s written a wonderfully creepy book.” –Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins Thank you [...]

The White Devil is full of sexual ambiguity. Is the hero straight or gay? Is Lord Byron straight or gay? Is England straight or gay? These are the questions that plague a young man’s soul. They get especially intense at the psychically vulnerable and polymorphously perverse age of 17, when our hero Andrew Taylor comes of [...]

“The White Devil is a page-turning tour de force.  Both a thoughtful and learned homage to the ghost story, and a clever and compelling rethinking of the genre, this is an amazing, frightening, and believable novel. I loved it.” – David Liss, author of The Devil’s Company, A Conspiracy of Paper, and the forthcoming The Darkening Green. [...]

Thank you, Gillian Flynn! “THE WHITE DEVIL is an intelligent, bristling ghost story with a stunning sense of place, a uniquely frightful spirit, and a band of absolutely charming heroes—Byronic and otherwise. You’ll dread reaching the end—while flipping the pages furiously.” –Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects and Dark Places

A few nights ago I felt very lucky when I got a phone call from a Hollywood producer. I know this scene well enough to know how it starts: “I have David Kanter for you.” It always starts with an assistant, who’s rolling the executive’s call list. If I had any moxie I would have [...]

First official review is in. A star! Daniel Kraus from BookList…allow me to buy you a big ol’ drink! Readers of this thoroughly upsetting horror-mystery hybrid will find their nightmares imprinted with several unshakable images, the worst of which is that of a withered child hunched over a bed, vomiting bile into the mouth of a sleeping [...]

I had an amazing conversation with my Uncle Freddie tonight. Uncle Freddie is 82 and is heart and soul of southern storytelling. I sometimes try to interrupt him on our telephone calls, in my New York way, and must stop myself. (He’s mid paragraph! I scold myself. Let him finish.) Every anecdote is pretty much [...]