Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
It’s frankly surprising that John Darnielle hasn’t written a novel before now.*
The driving force behind the Mountain Goats, Darnielle is regarded as a great storyteller. He populates his songwriting with stories of tragedy and empowerment, painful open wounds and monsters, both human and other. It can be raw and personal (“The Sunset Tree”) or metaphysical (“All Eternals Deck”) … or both at once.
His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, falls into this last category. Protagonist Sean Phillips, disfigured at age 17, lives as a recluse. Sean’s human contact comes in the form of a nurse, Vicky, and the sidelong and quickly averted eyes of strangers. He makes trips to the park or liquor store. Sean also runs a play-by-mail role-playing game, the kind once advertised in the back of Dragon magazine. The reading and answering of the game players’ moves form the backbone of his life. As the novel opens, Sean’s game has leaked into the real world, with tragic consequences for two young players.
Sean’s fantasy game, a post-apocalyptic survival epic called Trace Italian, takes its name from a (historic) star-shaped fortress whose outer fortifications contain even further fortifications inside, a layered maze for attackers to work through. The novel, spiraling out from one pivotal moment in Sean’s youth and then protecting that secret until the very end, follows the game’s structure in a convoluted manner.
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