Darnielle, the composer and vocalist for the indie band the Mountain Goats, also avoids the temptations of gratuitous 1980s pop culture nostalgia. “Wolf in White Van” thankfully touches only briefly on Sean’s ensuing legal trouble. This includes two adolescents whose interest in the game leads to one of their deaths. The collective will of his anonymous players becomes a stand-in for the housebound, reclusive game-master’s own desires: “The unnamed every-player who lies in the weeds at the moment of Trace Italian’s opening move - that’s me.” Years pass, and despite gamer audiences shifting to digital realms, Trace Italian still attracts a core of players. Trace Italian becomes the private realm Sean shares with strangers. “My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill,” he declares. He strives to “sheathe” his “old feelings” in “an imaginary scabbard inside myself.” He disappears from his parents, his caregiver and himself.
Players snail-mail Sean their text-based “moves.” These amount to choices like “Forage for roots / Follow the railroad / Wait for hunters / North to Nebraska.” Sean’s replies tell players what happens next.Īs he matures, Sean becomes a cipher. Unsurprisingly, it’s set in a grim, post-apocalyptic America of ghost towns, radiation exposure and endless dungeons. All screams.”Īfter a gruesome accident that leaves him with a disfigured face, the teenage Sean finds himself in excruciating pain and resigned to a long hospital stay, “faced with the choice of either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit.” So he constructs a fantasy role-playing game, Trace Italian, a “game of strategy and survival” that becomes a source of income for its pain-addled inventor. “I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else,” says Sean Phillips, the traumatized narrator of John Darnielle’s arresting, enigmatic debut novel, “Wolf in White Van.” As a kid, he was especially receptive to “dark dreams” of the pulpy, “Conan the Barbarian,” blood-oath and death-wish variety.
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