The Devils

by New Juche

Adieu all you Judges. New Juche returns with his book of ‘The Devils.’ An unsparing look into the dark rotten heart of Midlothian. Part true-crime narrative, part explicit memoir, ‘The Devils’ charts strange topographies and bloody histories. ‘Ever a fish out of water, ever a cunt,’ this is a vital occult dispatch from one of the most challenging and unnerving writers at work today.

Genres: Fiction

146 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2019

About the author

New Juche is the nom de guerre of a writer and photographer who lives and works in Southeast Asia. He is also the author of Wasteland, The Mollusc and Gymnasium.

Reviews

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Juche's rich and peat-y prose is a pleasure, as usual. I read the longer 5th section at 5am, during a bout of insomnia. I don't know if I should attribute the uncomfortable dreams afterwards to the book, but it was a disorienting and disturbing experience. Grim tales of growing up in rural Scotland interleave with references to the area's rich history, with bursts of shockingly violent events. And that cover is just gorgeous.

[Murderdeath · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cartography of criminal justice. A mental map of an event in question, rotated 135 degrees and still legible. Imaginary borders demarcating the grounds of prejudice and social custom. Myth, fact, history, testimony. Spectres of a dark past haunting the present. An incessant reminder... Twas ever thus.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read. The formative young years of New Juche. Long before the slums and wilds of Southeast Asia there was 80’s-era Scotland’s squalor, its oppressive gloom and grim history and bleak social circles, lovingly rendered in the quick, riveting, vivid, frequently lush and poetic prose I know and love and have come to expect.

So many memorable moments, but I found the fairly brief scene of childhood bullying involving discarded metal chair frames and quite a lot of spit and phlegm to be particularly striking and troubling.

New Juche is a force to be reckoned with, one of the most distinctive and unusual writing voices (and visual artists… his photographic work is stunning) working today, and The Devils only serves to further cement my high opinion of his work.

Highly recommended.

(Also seek out Stupid Baby and Mountainhead)

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

New Juche has excelled himself again with this, a compact true crime odyssey that maps the many foul deeds haunting the passageways of darkest Midlothian.

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited when a new New Juche book was announced, just took a bit to be able to grab it from A.S. This is slightly different than other books, gone is the south-Asian climate and present is a grimy Scotland and teenage rebellion alongside a brutal murder. It's narrated with the same gruesome flowers of detail that this writer is known for infused with a downcast hopelessness of the circumstances and bleak location. Overall it's a great one, I loved the change in scenery and the application of New Juche's style to this kind of story.

[final muzak · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this almost exclusively on too much trazadone or during hungover mornings — it was inexplicably invigorating

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find that with Juche’s work in particular, the way he writes, you can smell the various places he describes. Subtly caustic, disgusting genius.

[Adam Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recollections of youthfulness and violence. Another masterpiece from one of the best writers working today.

[David McLeod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite as satisfying as his masterpiece "Mountainhead", but still very well done. The final quarter of the book is especially enthralling. Damned good prose.

[Daniel Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I could not have been more wrong. The crime was most certainly inside the world of the Abbey, in the Abbey’s purview, completely in its sphere of influence, which was a sphere of monastic and sensual ghosts, of tunnels and bones and caskets, stone jars of heather ale, round loaves of barley pudding, sack cloth and hair shirts, the nun’s rugged vagina, the monk’s spindly anus, forbidden gardens and symbolic topiary and a sordid crust of some new violence belonging to our century now past and tied up utterly in the mining of coal.”

[D Lyons · Rating 5 out of 5]

cements New Juche as an all time great. breaks out of his writing about SE Asia to glimpse at his scottish childhood, and the waves of darkness constantly churning, while maintaining the themes of his other work, adapted now to look at how his surroundings informed his behavior and development as a young man, with the hint of annihilation constantly present. the bit about his Action Man figures is my favorite passage of 2019

[Zak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck...me.

Powerful. Delicate. Historical. An epic odyssey of psycho geographical whimsy, where historical placements and ever growing impressions on the masses consciousness reach out, intertwined with a personal reflection upon location, youth, violence, bullying and masculinity.

A sensation. Masterful reigns on the written word New Juche has.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2019/1...

[Interzonatron · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first foray into the work of New Juche, as well as Amphetamine Sulfate, both of which I’ve been wanting to get into for quite sometime. This book wasn’t what i was expecting at all. It’s a short 145 page book, and honestly up until page 95 I absolutely hated it. Which made me depressed because I’ve been waiting so long to read New Juche’s work. At the center of this book is the brutal murder of a 14 year old girl. And starting on page 95 we begin to get a series of descriptions that people often rumor about when attempting to understand what motivates someone to murder: perverse sexuality, sexual molestation, broken families, drugs, satanism, heavy metal, horror novels, pornography, mental illness, obsession with serial killers - warfare - war crimes and execution etc etc. I would probably disagree with Mr. New Juche, in that I do believe there are connections that one can make between some of the above interests and criminality. But what I would probably agree with Mr. New Juche on is, what draws people to these interests to begin with. Getting back to first principles is important, and not just meddling in the outcomes. And as New Juche shows in “The Devils” much of it goes back to the psychogeography, atmosphere & history of a place. I learned a lot in this book about the brutal history of Scotland - and how much of it still lingers on, and as Faulkner says

“The past is never dead. It's not even past”.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking place in Scotland, where New Juche grew up during the ‘80s but connecting his time in Newbattle with its history of torture and murder and the rape and murder in 2003 of a 15-year-old girl in a house close to where he once lived. The argument behind New Juche’s The Devils is that neighborhoods like the one he grew up in are breeding grounds for such atrocities. More to the point, he implies that crime, casual violence (domestic and public), routine drug and alcohol abuse—let alone torture and murder—are inherent to the historical place of Newbattle.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Nate M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost perfect. If not for a section near the beginning that was such a slog I almost bounced completely off this would be an easy 5 stars.

[Stella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written, meticulous, spoken dryly, monotonous. Bleak. But overall, just devastatingly uninteresting.

[Nicolas Koutsourais · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of my top three from the author. Feel like it establishes the psychology and rubric with which you can read his other books, which should chronologically all take place after.