Description
“Quiet, mysterious, menacing, taking you places you will never, never get out of your head.” —Daniel Handler
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, and are explorers of the Trace. But when
they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is
called on to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through
time, tracing back toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure
from the world in which most people live.
Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds
backward in time 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.
About the Author
John Darnielle is a writer, composer, guitarist, and
vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats; he is widely considered one of
the best lyricists of his generation. He lives in Durham, North
Carolina, with his wife and son.