John Darnielle - 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

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.


excerpt
Excerpt from Chapter 2 


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. Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle’s audacious and gripping debut novel is a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

Wolf in White Van is the story of Sean Phillips, who is left disfigured by an “accident” at a young age (later explained). His mutilation makes it difficult for him to hear or drink without a straw; his appearance makes it hard for others to be near him. In his isolation, he creates a pen-and-paper role-playing game called Trace Italian, played through mail correspondence. The game is successful enough to become Sean’s main source of income (he charges his handful of subscribers a monthly fee), and it serves as his only real window into the outside, even if it’s one that he has imagined himself. Sean writes, “I invented a world in the future and called it the Trace Italian. It was a place where I could have adventures, and when I grew up, I wanted to share those adventures with other people. I wanted specifically to share them with people like me, but I don’t know any people like me. Most people like me are dead.”
This is part of his court statement, one his lawyer reads on Sean’s behalf after a player of Trace Italian dies after acting out on her fanatical attachment to the game. We realize that Wolf in White Van is not so much a meditation on arts and games as on people’s obsessive relationships to them. (This is a risky proposition, particularly for Darnielle, who is better known as the songwriter behind the Mountain Goats.) The title itself is a reference to a ‘70s song by Larry Norman that people believed said “wolf in white van” when played backward.
Darnielle seems more comfortable rendering Sean’s emotional interior with nuance and understatement. The use of Trace Italian as a metaphor sometimes feels clumsy, but it does work effectively as a meditation on mortality. He writes, “Technically, it’s possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.”
Wolf in White Van is a quiet novel that moves nimbly, even as it makes jumps backward and forward in time. Its non-linear structure never feels disjointed partly because Darnielle sweeps his prose from scene to scene so elegantly, but also because the plot is secondary to his interest in tone and mood. Wolf is a sentimental novel in the best way, one that allows Sean’s melancholia to be expressed without being consumed by it.
In a rare moment, Sean inadvertently befriends a couple of teenagers behind a Korean liquor store. The two boys are horrified by Sean’s disfigurement, but they’re also fascinated by him. They get into a discussion of whether Sean would choose to look “more normal” or get his hearing back. Sean picks his hearing. In this moment we understand Sean best: He will choose something that helps him understand the world over something that helps the world understand him. It’s a stunning admission about isolation, that those who choose to be alone aren’t misunderstood but do not understand the world themselves. - Kevin Nguyen

Wolf in White Van is a disturbing character study of Sean, a teenager who invents a role playing game that almost destroys him and the people who play it. But it's also about how gaming is a form of salvation. There's a dark ambiguity at the heart of this mystery, making it one of the most intense reads of the year.

This is the first novel from singer/songwriter John Darnielle, creator of The Mountain Goats, and in some ways Wolf in White Van reads like one of his mournful songs about teenagers whose lives have been torn apart. But it would be more accurate to say that this novel captures the feeling of listening to The Mountain Goats: it's surreal, emotionally explosive, and often weirdly funny in ways you wouldn't expect.

When we first meet Sean, he seems to be atoning for something — or maybe for the lack of something. We know that his face is horribly disfigured, and that most of his contact with the world comes from home health workers who tend him. Trying to avoid people, he lives quietly at home, watching the world through his windows. But he has one other connection to humanity, through a post-apocalyptic role playing game he invented as a teenager.

The game is called Trace Italian, a reference to star forts called trace italiennes, and it's played through the mail. Every time a player wants to make a move, they describe it to Sean in a letter and he sends them a description of what happens next. Most of his answers are pre-written, but he often adds personal touches to reflect the personalities of his players. He's made enough money on the game to live modestly, and despite the rise of the internet he's still able to attract new players to what amounts to the world's slowest text-based adventure game.

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Though Sean tries not to get emotionally involved with the players, he develops certain preferences over the years. He loves the people who give themselves completely to the fantasy, pulling in references to their own lives, blurring the boundaries between the game and reality. For the most part, players of Trace Italian content themselves with figuring out how to navigate the American wasteland to safety in the game's eponymous fortress. But this harrowing journey is also an escape hatch, allowing them to flee the horror and boredom of their lives. The escape that Sean offers them is a kind of redemption, but it's also an intense danger.

As we wade deeper into Sean's murky past, we discover that he's been embroiled in a long, painful lawsuit with the parents of two teenagers who went too deep into Trace Italian. And we begin to guess that these teens' ecstatic/horrific U-turn into their own imaginations is an echo of whatever happened to Sean.

What's breathtaking about this novel is that Darnielle never takes the easy way out. He celebrates the transformative powers of shared storytelling, but is acutely aware of its pitfalls. The question that pulls us through Sean's story is always about when fantasy has gone too far, or when it does too good a job luring out the violence that lives inside our minds (or even, maybe, our souls). This isn't just a novel about gaming, or even pop culture, though there are plenty of references to cheesy sword and sorcery movies of the late twentieth century. Instead, it's about the often terrible ways that stories can distort our thinking, whether those stories come from the Bible, from Krull, or from our parents.

The most satisfying part of Wolf in White Van is that it raises more questions than it answers. Though we finally learn what has happened to Sean, and to some of the people who play his game, we are left to figure out the "why" for ourselves.

What makes one person wander into a fantasy world and then wander back out again, unscathed, while another is disfigured by it for life? The way that Darnielle forces you to think about these issues, in a variety of situations, will give you chills. Nothing is more terrifying, and more honest, than a story that acknowledges that there is no bright line between guilt and innocence. -
Annalee Newitz

From an early age, Sean Phillips, the narrator of John Darnielle’s novel Wolf in White Van, has counted himself among a particular sect of “young men who need to escape.” Alone in his backyard in Southern California in the early ’80s, he pretended he was Conan the Barbarian; when he got a little older, he replied to small-print ads in the backs of magazines that said things like “Catalog of Rare and Unknown Swords from Around the World, Send Three Dollars and Two International Reply Coupons.” He spent countless hours—days, maybe weeks—scouring the sci-fi and fantasy sections of bookstores, seeking out the pulpiest, most garish covers. When he was a teenager, he collected a stack of D-list horror VHS tapes with names like Gor and Krull, and he listened to abrasive music at volumes loud enough to drown out the squawk of uncomprehending adults. At his most self-aware, he saw his life governed by a sad paradox: The fact that he knew he was a recognizable type did not make him feel any less alone.
As the founding member of the prolific, fiercely beloved band the Mountain Goats, Darnielle is something of an expert regarding the plight of outcasts. His songs employ the narrative strategies of short stories—one album, 2002’s Tallahassee, was composed of songs describing an alcoholic couple who moved to the titular city in an attempt to quit drinking—and many of his protagonists are star-crossed kids: A teenage death-metal duo break up when one member is sent to boarding school; an injured high-school football star does federal time after selling acid to an undercover cop; a boy is so transported by drinking scotch with his girlfriend and playing video games that he momentarily forgets about his abusive stepfather. Full of rich details, Darnielle’s lyrics display a palpable love of language, and his early records suggested that it would be only a matter of time before he tried his hand at fiction. In 2008, he made a modest go of it with Master of Reality, his entry into Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series on classic albums. Darnielle’s take was perhaps the series’s most formally inventive: a brief epistolary novel narrated by a teenager in a psychiatric facility, who makes an impassioned and convincing case to the hospital staff as to why they should give him back his confiscated Black Sabbath tapes. Short but searing, Master of Reality was a testament to how teenage trauma can reverberate across an entire life, as well as to the profound, even sacred effect that supposedly “low” art can have on a beaten-down imagination.
Wolf in White Van takes both of these sentiments a step further. Sean is no longer a teenager in the novel’s present tense, but in a certain way his life is forever frozen at seventeen—that’s the age when, in an accident whose details remain a mystery for much of the novel, he was shot in the face and severely disfigured. “Words like pretty and ugly exist in a different vocabulary from the one you might invent to describe a face that had to be put back together by a team of surgeons,” he explains. “My face is strange and terrible. It merits a little staring.” Most of those aforementioned “young men who need to escape” eventually grow out of their misfit status, or at least find like-minded fellow travelers, but Sean’s disfigurement makes permanent the alienation he felt as a teenager. Decades later, his only meaningful relationship is with the home nurse who comes to periodically clean his grafted skin; he does his food shopping early in the morning to avoid stares. His life has become a version of those cheap horror movies he’s always loved, only its monster is tragically human.
Wolf in White Van offers up something more complex than just doom and gloom, though. As Sean was slowly recovering his eyesight in the hospital, we learn, he passed the time by devising and inhabiting an alternate reality in his head—a dystopian vision of earth scorched by a collapsed nuclear reactor. When he’s discharged, he indulges his inner pulp-fiction author and transforms his vision into an elaborate play-by-mail game called Trace Italian (named for the player’s ultimate destination, a radiation-free shelter hidden “in the new deserts of Kansas”). The game finds a modest cult following, and in subsequent years, maintaining the subscriptions of the players (some of whom have been playing for decades) becomes his life’s work. The Trace is a role-playing game that describes to players post-
apocalyptic scenarios (“You see the horde of misshapen half-human creatures on bony horses”) and presents a finite number of options (Attack? Retreat? Or tend to your wound from the previous turn?). Some players answer with terse notes; others write such voicey and voluminous explanations of their actions that their turns have the intimacy of letters from old friends. The game becomes Sean’s oblique connection to the world he’s estranged from. One teenage boy even takes to signing his missives “Love, Lance.”
Darnielle is a more powerful writer in shorter forms; his best songs teem with a brutal but cathartic urgency, and Sean’s voice is relatively placid by comparison. Perhaps this is why, although we get to read some of the Trace turns, the world of the game never quite comes to life. Much more vivid, though, are the seemingly mundane details of Sean’s daily life, as well as the synergistic relationship between “life” and “the game.” We eventually learn that those pulpy sci-fi paperbacks actually saved Sean’s life; they enabled him to envision his recovery as a kind of adventure, motivating him to endure the Sisyphean task of living through another day. “Pushing myself against the wall-rail down the hall to the shower room,” he recalls of his long hospital stay, “I would picture myself scurrying shirtless through the few gutted buildings that remained in the slumping cities . . . served lunch, I would imagine that I was foraging for uncontaminated canned foods.” Right up to its tense closing scene, Wolf in White Van is a quietly bracing novel about the power—but also the isolation—of an overactive imagination. Without becoming sentimental or excessively bleak, Darnielle has created an empathetic character study: sustained eye contact with a person from whom most would avert their glance. - Lindsay Zoladz

We recently ran an excerpt from Wolf In White Van, a novel exposing Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle not only as a lyrical genius, but as one hell of a novelist. Since then, the book has blown up, climbing onto the New York Times Bestsellers List and receiving a nomination for this year’s National Book Award, all of which is so intensely refreshing to see. Behind all that hubbub, for once, is actually one of the most compelling books of the year, a complex and constantly unwinding story of a disfigured man who operates a text-based role-playing game by mail. By turns mysterious, heart-rending, cryptic, hilarious, OCD-laced, and basically by transitive property capable of all other traits comprising any of those cult games that may have for some time overrun your life, it’s easy to see how Wolf In White Van could inspire total obsession.
Recently, Darnielle was kind enough to correspond with me via email to answer some questions about the book, his history with gaming, haunted feelings, and much more.
VICE: Correct me if I'm wrong, but after reading the book it seems pretty obvious to me that you were or are a gamer. I don't think I've read a book that nailed the obsessive hoarder pleasure of role-playing quite like this. Is there a game that most haunts you, or one that's closest to your heart?
John Darnielle: I played video games from early on and can probably break down my Ages of Video Game life like this:
I. Pinball enthusiast skeptical about and fearful of the new machines (Asteroids, Space Invaders) in the arcade
II. Reality-accepting pinball enthusiast spending half his arcade time at the video games (Centipede, Qix, Missile Command)
III. Guy whose friends had an NES but who, himself, didn't. This means I didn't get into first-generation cartridge stuff until they cut the price on the NES because they were making room for the SNES, which I've still never played. This era for me is defined by Ninja Gaiden III, which is a masterpiece.
IV. Guy who bought a Nintendo 64: The hype around this machine was huge, and we couldn't really afford it but we got it anyway. For ages there were only four games you could get in the US to play on this system and one of them was fucking Goldeneye. A lot of people loved fucking Goldeneye, but I could not give a shit about that so I played Mario 64 until I'd gotten every star twice and found Yoshi on top of the castle and then a friend at work loaned me Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, which was huge, because it was such an immersive world with such clear good/evil boundaries, which are something I like: not always, I also like—you know—other configurations, but I respond pretty viscerally to evil villains who seek to punish the innocent sheerly for the sake of magnifying their own evil. I hadn't, prior to this game, even with Mario 64, felt that total-narrative-immersion thing that became the norm in video games for quite a while. The first time I arrived at the Temple of Time, the quiet in there, the echo of the footsteps... it's still pretty vivid.
This is all prologue though. The game that haunts me most dates back to era II and was called Dazzler, and involved feeding bananas to a gorilla trapped at the center of the screen, and there are vultures chasing you because they hate the gorilla maybe? And you have to drop snakes behind you to distract the vultures, and the hero's name was Oh, and I am submitting this link as proof of these claims because I totally get that they're pretty extraordinary claims. Dazzler is kind of representative of what was great about that "quick, invent a game" era of coin-operated games: some guy probably wrote the plot because that was his job—to think up a game. "Feed the gorilla while evading vultures" was his idea on a given day at work. There are a lot of games from that era where the plot feels like something that came to somebody in a dream, and they're really quietly inspirational to me.

Photo via Flickr user abbyladybug

The narrator in the novel is the creator of many games himself. One in particular, Trace Italian, incidentally ends up connecting fantasy to reality with damaging results. For him, the whole game generated from his obsession with the phrase "Trace Italian." I wonder if the world of the novel at first revealed itself to you in a way like this, from some strange kernel?
You are absolutely right on about me and the glow that certain words and phrases, mainly phrases, have for me. It's the joy of giving things titles—when I was a young music obsessive, I sort of had this hierarchy of coolness in my mind. Albums whose titles did not come from one of the songs were almost always way cooler than albums that took their titles from the names of one of the songs. Albums whose titles came from within one of the songs but not from one of the song's titles, that was pretty cool, because it pointed you specifically at that one song without being super-obvious about it—it was like a clue on how to read the album. Self-titled albums that weren't debuts, this was a weird grammar that I later learned within the record business is basically an admission of defeat and/or a marketing strategy.
In the case of the book, I wrote the last chapter first, right? And then the thing happens at the end of it, and I was like, that's the sort of short story you write when you're 12: some stuff happens and the narrator dies. I kept hammering away at a forward-moving book with a bunch of narrators saying interesting stuff sometimes, but the story was kind of going nowhere... but then one day while working, I thought how that last chapter story is probably actually an OK story if you work backward to it somehow. And so that led me down a rabbit-hole of thinking about backward masking, which used to be this super-cool arcane knowledge area back before you could just dial up the supposed backward-masking things online, and I ended up reading about this Larry Norman song—Larry Norman being more or less the founder of Christian rock, a really interesting figure—that, when you play it backward, is supposed to say "Wolf in White Van."
And so, like... that's the sort of phrase that, as a writer of any kind, I think you have to hear it and feel wonder. It's just so evocative and open. Why no article: "the" white van, "a" white van? What's going on, that some person thinks that's what he hears? The person who thinks that's what he hears, how does that bizarre image function for him? Why is it evil, if it's evil? At any rate it sounds kind of dangerous and ominous, right? So I assigned it to the book as the title, and got the idea of tracing backward, and this phrase—I feel like the idea of a phrase being obscure enough to really be open to whatever you want to bring to it, that's where phrases come alive for me. When there's not enough information in something so you have to supply it yourself.
Do you listen to music when you write?
I listen to music sometimes when I write, but I'm always having to stop, because I read everything I write out loud. That's the test of whether it works or not, for me: how it sounds out loud. But when I'm just sitting down for the morning, or when it's a little loud out in the house beyond my office room, I'll listen either to classical music (I listened to a lot of Scriabin while writing Wolf) or metal: usually death metal, usually older stuff. In part "usually older" because if I'm listening to something I'm not super-familiar with, it'll probably distract me. Music is great both for feeding the mood of the writing but also for staying out of the way while providing a sort of conscious-mind minor distraction for me. So, like, I know the first two Mercyful Fate albums backward and forward, so I listened to those a lot. And the Warfare Noise comp of Brazilian thrash. And this band called Moss, a fair bit of slow doomy stuff really lets me write while being slow enough to not distract me. If things get real active and up-tempo, it's too much and I have to choose between either the music or the writing.
And finally I listened to a lot of ambient, which is so useful, because you can sort of assign a mood to it—even the cheery stuff—if you say: "This is ambient music for funerals" in your mind, you can get a pretty funereal vibe from it. This podcast called Ultima Thule is kind of my first-look listening when I sit down to write. It's pretty perfect.

Photo via Flickr user sketchbookkid

I got the feeling at times that the narrator was the voice of a ghost, someone who was beyond reality, but left inside it because of a wrong he'd done, accidentally or not. Do you believe in ghosts? Something beyond death?
I have to get all cute and 90s-college with this: I do "believe" in "ghosts." That is, I think ghostliness is a thing and there are ghosts in everybody's lives and the idea of ghosts is something that's going to inform how I or anybody else relates to the world whether we think of them as existing outside our consciousness or not. Like, objectively, do I believe that the spirits of the dead exist outside of the consciousness of the living? No. But that's not the same as nonexistence. I think of ghosts as something you have, like a cold. And, like a cold, you're probably always going to have it again.
You're right that Sean is pretty ghostly, especially because he's been reborn: the Sean people knew (the only one people knew; hardly anybody knows the rebuilt Sean) is a ghost haunting the lives of the people who knew him. But because he survived, he gets to see what that's like—to have been a person who now haunts others.
I would prefer to believe in a world beyond this one—I always liked the teaching that this world is not illusory but sort of play-acting while the spiritual world is the actual, absolute reality—I used to read a lot of Vaisnava texts about this stuff. But honestly, no. At the same time, there's so much that's illusory that we buy into just for the sake of getting along daily that I like to sort of hold ideas of other worlds as possibilities in my mind, in that internal yes-and-no space, which is also where fiction lives. For instance: I read about a murder, and it's gruesome as fuck, and it's so vivid and I knew the killed character well enough that it feels very real, and is real in this space in my head, but nowhere else.
That's what ghosts are like for me: real, but probably only for me. - Interview by Blake Butler