Songwriter and novelist John Darnielle.
John Darnielle, better known as the songwriter behind indie band The Mountain Goats, is no stranger to crafting emotionally powerful stories with intricate wordplay. He’s regarded as one of the best lyricists in modern music. Darnielle’s even tackled a novel before — Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality for the 33 1/3 series — but Wolf in White Van is his first original work not tied to an existing literary project.
Darnielle’s songs often deal with people on the fringes of society, such as isolated teenagers, drug addicts and lonely people considered “different” from all walks of life. Darnielle also has a deep abiding love of horror films, death metal and other genre elements that don’t traditionally translate well to high-school popularity or middle-class American parental approval. Wolf in White Van is unmistakably a Darnielle work in all the best ways.
John Darnielle
The novel’s protagonist, Sean Phillips, is mostly confined to his house after a horrific, disfiguring incident in his youth and spends his time crafting role-playing games. His major project, and the central conceit of the novel, is the play-through-mail adventure game Trace Italian, a post-apocalyptic narrative in which players must survive long enough to reach the eponymous fabled safe house. Sean sends the players their current predicament and choices in a letter, and they respond with their decisions to see what transpires. It’s an interesting idea for a game, and the sheer imaginative process of creating such an intricate world is given appropriate consideration in the novel itself.
Yet no one ever wins Trace Italian. People generally lose interest and stop playing at some point, except for a few who have more involved stories in the game, which Sean can’t stop thinking about. These few players, whom Sean has never met, haunt him throughout the novel.
Most of Wolf in White Van is structured around a non-chronological collection of Sean’s life and memories, stretching from before his accident to his present-day problems and everything in between. Early on, the novel alludes to events that are only revealed when the narrative swings back to explore them near the end. It’s sometimes unclear when everything is happening. For the most part, it works, but sometimes it’s a bit distracting. The novel doesn’t turn its focus to any one element in particular. Instead, it probes the hidden, not-quite-describable darkness inside Sean through all its avenues and twisted streets.
Late in Wolf in White Van but earlier in Sean’s life, he reflects on his parents’ inability to understand his dark interests: “There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exist, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They’re not being kept secret from us, but they’re secret all the same.”
It’s a powerful line in a quietly powerful scene that’s instantly familiar to anyone with interests outside the norm. Sean’s darkness is never overt, never explained or rationalized. We all have some of that inside us, that same darkness that drives us to horror films in droves and makes Halloween so fascinating. Yet sometimes it goes deeper, as it does with Sean.
In Wolf in White Van, Darnielle has crafted a poignant love letter to the outcasts of the world and to everyone who has retreated into some type of fiction or art to shelter from the perils of life, no matter who disapproved. It’s refreshingly honest about the merits and detriments of escapism — it mostly looks at these people with a tender affection while also warning against becoming too enraptured with one’s own fictional world. Wolf in White Van is a powerful novel of depression, loneliness, games, creativity, parents, growing up and that indescribable darkness that lies in wait like a wolf.
