Wolf in White Van: A Novel

John Darnielle

Sep 2014 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award in fiction
Winner of the 2015 Alex Award for adult books with special appeal for young adults

Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle's audacious and gripping debut novel Wolf in White Van is a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move.

Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian—a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail—Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America.

Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.

Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean's life.

Ratings and reviews

Albert Camus' *The Stranger* set in 1980s-2000s America --with the cultural and sub-cultural setting of those eras well fleshed out. The first thing you'll notice about this book is it's beautifully written. The second thing you'll notice is that's deeply allegoric. The book asks questions that have no answers, or more precisely that have answers that lead to more questions. All the questions and all the answers and all the questions that follow are dangerous --just like the moves and resulting moves in the *Trace Italian*. *Trace Italian* is a text based by mail RPG game the protagonist, Sean, creates and manages after suffering a traumatic event during adolescents; left disfigured for life and (for his formative years) invalid. Ostensibly it's a source of income available to someone whose disfigurement warrants seclusion, but truly the game means much more to Sean. It is a game that cannot be finished, where players escape danger only to find themselves in greater danger. The game is allegory for Sean's view of life, and for the themes of *Wolf in White Van.* There's a lot about *Trace Italian* in the book, but that's not what the book is capital A About. It's About a lot of things. Relationships, all kinds of relationships and the things they are based on. It's about memory. It's about our decisions and their motivations. Mostly it's about the desire for safety, safety from things we don't understand --things that make us feel different or scared or angry. It's about what that even means to be safe, and how tragic that desire is.

Having just finished this book in a public place was maybe a bad idea. A really great story, I think John has an amazing sense for what it feels like to be outcast and have nothing but your own boiling thoughts to keep you company, it shows in Master of Reality, and here it takes full bloom. The connections between the Trace and between Sean and his players and his distant patents, it's all such an overwhelming reality some how. So now I'll just cry on this bus Thank you.

The actual things in the story are fairly uninteresting and wouldn't need more than a few pages to describe. The greatness of the book is how all the space in between is filled. Put simply, he's a great writer.

About the author

John Darnielle is a writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats; he is widely considered one of the best lyricists of his generation. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and son.