Wolf in White Van

By: John Darnielle

Narrated by: John Darnielle

Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2014 John Darnielle (P)2014 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“John Darnielle's amazing novel digs into an artist's unspoken fears . . . Like Darnielle's songwriting, the prose is often cryptic and then stunningly clear, microscopically specific and then audaciously grand. The words soothe for sentences at a time, then strike with blunt force.” —Carl Wilson, Slate

“A stunning meditation on the power of escape, and on the cat-and-mouse contest the self plays to deflect its own guilt.” —Ethan Gilsdorf, The New York Times Book Review

“John Darnielle is a great songwriter, tipping light toward every kind of human suffering, and his powers are on full display in Wolf in White Van. The prose lives like Sean's imagination: a breathing, glowing thing. In Darnielle's novel, as in his songs, the monstrously true and unbelievably beautiful press up against one another. Together, they begin to dance.” —Carmen Maria Machado, NPR.org

Amazing and Moving

A tale told in several pieces, this story grabs you early on and stays interesting from the first word to the last. John Darnielle's reading is so intentional and emphatic that it adds its own layer to the story, and gives it a personal edge that has significant impact at several points in the story.

Haunting narrative

I acquired this book to prepare for a book club discussion. John's narration was excellent!

Short but daring

It can sometimes feel a bit all over the place and leaves some questions to be answered, but the ride of the story is wonderful in its darkness.

amazingly frightening book

This book was totally gripping and mysterious and horrifying. It is really well written and I could not stop listening even though the trajectory was a downer of massive proportions. I cannot / will not spoil the book by blathering about the plot. It is good/great and worth a second listening and I don't every listen again. Read by the author and he was great. Too bad he isn't a regular reader.

The language of this book is well crafted.

At face value this isn't the kind of story I'd normally enjoy but it has wormed itself into my brain. It has layers that I only discovered on subsequent listening. It's just really well done.

Lovely and disturbing

Any additional comments?

I love this little book so much that I'm nervous about recommending it to anyone. I get that it's not for everyone, but it totally worked for me.
Wolf in White Van is a series of disjointed small scenes filled with incredibly specific details. I was not a teenage boy in the 80s and I don't like role playing games, but I know some things about feeling isolated, and Darnielle captures that feeling beautifully. I enjoyed learning about the narrator's past and present through all the small, weird observations, but I didn't expect the ending to move me as strongly as it did. I loved the book even more the second time.

Melancholy

Very sad stuff. A reflection on escapism and loneliness and the human condition. The notes of this song linger with you after you finish listening.

A Disjointed and Somewhat Monotone Experience

This title has been on my book "radar" for some time. As someone who has explored the various aspects of gaming and loves to read, I was admittedly interested in the concept of a story that involves a text-based role-playing game. And it just so happens, it met the requirements for a challenge prompt. So I quickly worked it into the line-up this month.

The prompt: A book with an animal in the title.

The Rundown: Wolf in White Van follows the events surrounding Sean, after a disfiguring accident has left him isolated. In the wake of said events, he creates an imaginary world within a text- based role-playing game, Trace Italian.  Through the development of this game which is played via the mail, Sean guides players on an adventure through an imaginary landscape. However, when two young individuals are met with unfortunate outcomes after deciding to take the game into the real world, Sean finds himself on the stand and called into question.

The Characters: Really there is only one at the center of this story, Sean. He is viable but nothing extraordinary. I was a bit disappointed in the lack of emotion he conveys as someone who has been through and is now facing another large hurdle in life. I did not dislike him, but I failed to develop any true connection with him. There was no real growth or evolution occurring. The supporting characters were limited, but this was understandable. The story is about a young man who has been shut off from the world after a terrible accident. It made sense that there were not many individuals who really stood out in the story.

Execution & Story: In terms of originality, I am offering a few bonus points here. The attempt to incorporate Trace Italian into the narration delivers something a bit different for readers. And maybe for some, will even establish the connection I failed to. However, the sequence of events felt disjointed and often interrupted. The pacing was oddly slow and the overall effect dry and monotone. A lot has and was happening for there to be so little tension or excitement. The story did not feel like it ever progressed.

Writing & Narration: I always enjoy when an author chooses to narrate their own audiobooks. I find a strange satisfaction in knowing the voice accompanying the story is the creator. It was no different in this case. But again, the pacing is painfully slow and there is never any moment of anticipation or urgency. I did not really struggle with this as audio, but cannot help but wonder how it translates on to paper. I would imagine much like someone's rambling and vacant thoughts.

Conclusion: I was honestly pleased to put this one behind me. We just did not click. I require stories that build up a certain amount of anticipation and have more direction. I want to be driven to a conclusion. I found Wolf in White Van is more of just an existing series with no powerful moments, but I am sure there is an audience willing to embrace it.

Nothing like it that I've seen/read

This is a unique novel. It is strange yet compelling. I found the pace a bit hard to latch on to at first, but after I got it down, it was easy to follow. What I like most is that the author allows the reader to come to his own conclusions without guiding him to a conclusion that was preordained. It left me thinking, and I am still thinking about it days later. It is one of those books that I will use to compare other books to. I don't want to list many plot points for fear of spoiling it, but the idea that a drastic accident causes someone to create an alternate universe in the form of a mail order role playing game is something that I never thought would exist, let alone hold my attention throughout. I would hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who doesn't have a wide scope of interests or a tolerance for this unique style (sort of like Chuck Palaniuk). If you do read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Backward masking, PBM games, and suicide

Wolf in White Van refers to the cryptic phrases supposedly revealed by listening to records backwards, which those of us old enough to get all the pop culture references in this book will recall was one of the big moral panics incited by Christian evangelicals back in the 80s. In one of many scenes described by the first-person narrator, Sean, in this non-linear novel, he actually calls one of those evangelical stations, as a child, during their "prayer hour," to ask about this phenomena.

Of course, the astute reader will also realize that it's a clever reference to the book itself, since it starts at the end and unravels back to the beginning of what eventually lead Sean to the trial with which the book begins.

Sean created a play-by-mail game called Trace Italian, in which the players journey across a post-apocalyptic America searching for a mysterious location called Trace Italian. They send in their moves, and Sean selects a few boilerplate paragraphs from his files, customizes them a bit, and sends them back. It might seem very strange if you never played one of these games. I did play a lot of PBM games back in the 80s and 90s. They were a lot of fun. The Internet mostly killed the industry, of course (the more savvy PBM companies moved to email and web-based gaming), but as Sean tells us, even though he expected the Internet to kill his game as well, he retains a loyal following even into the 21st century, still sending in moves by old-fashioned snail mail. This makes Trace Italian a sort of cult phenomenon, which fits with the events in the book, in which Sean, mostly confined to a secluded existence thanks to a horrible disfigurement, briefly touches the lives of his players and gets glimpses, and more often, speculations, about their diverse outside lives, through the handful of sentences they exchange every couple of weeks in the medium of the game. It gives the entire book the same mysterious, opaque feeling as the game described within the book, in which it's never quite known what is going on, but everyone is drawn in trying to put the pieces together.

In the beginning, we learn that two teenage players of Sean's game tried to play it in real life, apparently convinced that the game was giving them clues to things they could find in the real world. This ended in a sad and tragic fashion, and the parents of one of the teens blamed Sean and sued him.

From there, we go backwards. We know initially only that Sean is terribly disfigured - his voice is difficult to understand, his face makes people look away. Eventually we learn how he became disfigured, but the details, the hows and whys and circumstances, are parceled out bit by bit as Sean continues moving back and forth, from his present existence as the creator of a strange little postal game that gives him a meager supplement to his income, to the events that caused teenaged Sean to become a lonely, disabled monster, events which are echoed in the lawsuit back in his present.

This is an odd, interesting, and clever book, and I'd like to have liked it more. I got all the references - the Conan novels, the science fiction magazines, the PBM games, the Moral Majority and their hysteria about Satanic messages in rock music - and I do appreciate clever and different novels.

But I'm not that impressed by "ambiguous" novels. I don't need everything spelled out for me - I am okay with the author leaving some questions unanswered. But in the end, I still had no understanding of what troubled Sean, what caused him to do what he did, what he was besides an angsty kid with a difficult relationship with his parents. Maybe that is all the author intended me to understand, and he built this short novel about a troubled kid on layers of self-referential narrative devices and cultural easter eggs to be unearthed like the mysteries in Trace Italian. It was an ambitious effort that didn't quite land for me, so I can only give it 3.5 stars, which I will round up to 4 because I'd probably try reading something by John Darnielle again.