Wolf in White Van

I was interested in reading Wolf in White Van for a couple of reasons: one, the author is John Darnielle, not well known as a writer of prose but rather of music, and at times the only member of the eclectic rock group known as The Mountain Goats. Secondly, it's the only novel I've heard of that is about play-by-mail games.

I got into play-by-mail thirty-some years ago. Most of them, even those that exist today, are computer-generated, but a few were actually done by hand. The creator of the game would send you your situation, and you'd respond, by mail!, with what you would do next, and he'd write back to tell you what happened to you.

In this book, the narrator, Sean Phillips, owns a game company and his most popular game is called Trace Italian, which has players in a zombie-filled post-apocalypse heading toward a safe haven in a fortress somewhere in Kansas. That's only part of the story, though. We quickly learn that Sean is horribly disfigured, by an "accident" that gradually reveals itself as a suicide attempt by rifle to the face.

The attempt was unsuccessful: "I did hope that at some point I'd be able to explain my recent theory that it isn't really possible to kill yourself, that everybody goes on forever in multiple dimensions..." The other plot thread is that Sean is being sued by parents of an impressionable teen who took the game so seriously that he and his girlfriend went to the Plains and one died of exposure.

The world of play-by-mail is a by-product of the role-playing games that started in the '70s, especially Dungeons and Dragons. For those who didn't have the friends nearby (and let's face it, D&D fans often could be short of friends) the mail became a lifeline. This world is aptly considered by Darnielle, who has Sean beginning to create his world as a teenager, knitting it together, bit by bit, especially when he is recovering from his self-inflicted gunshot wound. For those who play the games, the escapism is apparent, but what about those who create the worlds? They are even further into their minds, making a place where they can go in their heads.

The book hops back and forth between past and present, leading to the day that Sean shoots himself. We try, like truffle-hunting pigs, to discover the reasons why he does what he does. He seems to be pretty normal, if a nerd. He is a great fan of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, even to the point where he buys a cassette tape by a band who writes all their songs about them (The Mountain Goats have done similar things--their latest has songs all about pro wrestling). There are some great teenage angst bits like: "Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them."

There are also philosophical statements that do not edge too far into pretentiousness or solipsism: "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."

As stated, the book ends with an account of the day Sean shoots himself. It may be disappointing to some that there is no obvious trigger. It seems like a normal day, when he goes to a video arcade and makes out with a girl for the first time. But so often incidents like these have no obvious answer, and Darnielle resists the obvious.