Unable to enter into the ongoing flow of society around him, Sean operates mail-in adventure games out of his apartment. The novel’s narrator and protagonist is a young man who lives in seclusion because of his severely disfigured face. John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van is a book about a person my father might have tried to encourage in a similar way. Regardless of whether this was true in my case, a bolt of truth hit me as my father spoke: It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand, what doesn’t offer itself up for interpretation according to your categories. He elaborated: “They are afraid of you because they do not understand you.

“They only say those things to you,” he said, “because they are afraid of you.” Of course, I was not a scary guy-grass blade thin, wore clothes like a pole wears a tent, athletic like a sloth trying to get away from a fire-but I immediately understood what he meant. I was in the depths one day when my father tried to reason me out of my sadness. They constantly reminded me of their love and that was often enough to help me forget.

My parents did their best to console me, but mine were not superficial anxieties my social dread would hum at roughly Lovecraftian levels, and that was just my emotional baseline. Named for the star-shaped fortification style trace italienne, this endpoint is the game’s appropriately dynamic name.When I was young, I’d sometimes come home from school on the cusp of tears-the memory of however I’d been mistreated that day still fresh like black paint. After the accident, from his hospital bed, he begins developing a mail-order role-playing game (this is pre-Internet) where players plot careful moves in an irradiated future America as they fight to reach a point of safety called the Trace Italian. Even before the accident, Sean lost himself in such rites of passage as prog-rock, heavy metal, and Conan the Barbarian novels. Wolf in White Van takes us into the mind of Sean Phillips, who is very much defined by an ‘accident’ at age seventeen that left him disfigured for life. Perhaps because he’s been there himself, Darnielle has managed to do this without appearing exploitive or condescending, and his first full-length novel follows suit. During more than two decades as a songwriter, he has returned again and again to young misfits who find solace in music and other forms of escape – whether comic books, games, movies, or drugs. Despite the acoustic guitar driving most of his music as the leader of celebrated American band The Mountain Goats, John Darnielle hung out with the ‘metal kids’ in high school.

Wolf in white van reviews