Wolf in White Van

June 16, 2014
In his incantatory debut, Darnielle (of the indie band the Mountain Goats) captures the allure and danger of being in thrall to a mythic vision. Lying in the hospital recovering from a gruesome wound, Sean conceives of a mail-based strategy game in a “fury of assembly,” building out an “idle little dream in a small dead space.” In the game’s scenario, players head across an apocalyptic landscape in search of sanctuary at the Trace Italian, a star-shaped fort on the “wasted Kansas plain.” With each successive choice, players find themselves further along a “path than can belong only to them.” Darnielle doles out just enough information about the game to give it texture without stripping it of its mystery. The appeal lies in decoding the landscape, scanning for “little details” that reveal a larger pattern and might eventually allow players to figure out the impenetrable safe harbor. When one young couple’s attempt to find the Trace Italian in real life leads them to a fatal “terminus” in the desert, Sean revisits his own dark history. He tracks back through the branching series of choices that led to his disfiguring injury, the creation of the game, and the couple’s tragic end. Through it all the Trace looms, a monumental symbol for a supple novel.

October 1, 2014

Though in a way about sf, this debut novel by the lead singer of the Mountain Goats is not a sf story. It's essentially a character study about narrator Sean Phillips, a thirtysomething man with severe facial disfiguration caused by an "accident" during his late teens. It's only after about 100 pages that we start to learn the nature of the incident and much later that we discover more details. While recovering, Sean imagined and later realized a mail-in game called Trace Italian; much of the book deals with moves from the game, especially when one couple extends it to reality with fatal results. Not much is made of the court case that ensues. Mid-book there's a vignette, in which Sean watches a man deliberately back his truck at speed into the front (face) of a parked car, then drive off. The point? None, until you realize it's a foreshadowing, also an "accident." It's that kind of book. The title comes from the satanic lyrics of a rock song played backwards. VERDICT Beautifully written psychological fiction for sophisticated readers, with not much else like it out there.--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2014
A man badly disfigured in a gun accident ponders gaming, heavy metal, family, love and the crazed emotions that tend to surround our obsessions. As the singer-songwriter of the band the Mountain Goats, Darnielle specializes in impressionistic, highly literate lyrics delivered in a stark, declamatory voice. Much the same is true of Sean Phillips, the narrator of Darnielle's second novel, who has been largely housebound since his accident at 17 and is prone to imaginative flights of fancy. (Similarly, Darnielle's first novel was a consideration of the Black Sabbath album "Master of Reality" as told by an institutionalized teenage boy.) We know early on that Sean makes a modest income as the inventor of Trace Italian, a role-playing game conducted through the mail about a post-apocalyptic America; and we know that he was implicated in the death of a woman who obsessively played the game with her boyfriend. The novel shifts back and forth in time as Sean recalls a geeky boyhood of Conan the Barbarian novels, metal albums, and other swords-and-sorcery fare; its tension comes from Darnielle's careful and strategic withholding of the details behind the woman's death and Sean's disfigurement. In the meantime, the mazelike paths of Trace Italian serve as a metaphor for the difficulty (if not impossibility) of finding closure, and they also reveal Sean's ingenuity and wit. The book's title refers to a diabolical subliminal message on a metal record, a topic Sean is particularly interested in. (The novel seems partly inspired by a teenager's failed suicide attempt in 1985 that led to reconstructive facial surgeries and a lawsuit against the band Judas Priest.) Sean is a consistently generous and sympathetic hero, and if the novel's closing pages substitute ambiguity for plainspokenness, they highlight the book's theme of finding things worth living for within physical and psychological despair. A pop culture-infused novel that thoughtfully and nonjudgmentally considers the dark side of nerddom.

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September 1, 2014
Sean Phillips was an unremarkable, moody teenager until tragedy left him with a horrific injury, changing his life forever. Who or what drove him to his fate? Can anyone be blamed? Is there a lesson to be learned? These questions are explored but never fully answered in Darnielle's first full-length novel. To read it is to become claustrophobically trapped inside Sean's disfigured head as he alternates between dealing with the repulsive medical realities of his trauma and escaping to the role-playing-game world he has since created. While most of his mail-order game customers are anonymous, a handful come to mean more to Sean than mere characters on paper. Their paths, walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy, put Sean's into stark relief. Within the constructs of his game world, each turn presents finite choices, but in real life, the possibilities are limitless and, therefore, potentially terrifying. As senseless as a car accident, and as hard to look away from, the inconclusiveness of this journey will either captivate or madden readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)