This idea, that of the direction of the particular path taken having been dictated by a series of choices made, lies at the very heart of the novel. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic America, in which players have to make their way across the central states in search of the Trace Italian – a “shining structure” on the plains of Kansas (named after the star fort or trace italienne Sean learnt about in history lessons at school: a structure comprised of “triangular defensive barricades branching out around all sides of a fort”), “protecting the sprawling self-contained city underneath it”, a refuge from the mutant hominids who roam the irradiated Earth above.Īs Darnielle begins his descriptions, it’s easy to visualise detailed images on a computer screen, but Trace Italian exists only in the imagination of Sean and his players – it operates like a classic choose-your-own-adventure story, but played via snail mail: the players choose their next move from the options available at the end of the scene they’ve been sent, and mail their decision to Sean, who then sends back the associated next instalment in the journey, at the end of which, inevitably, is another set of choices and so on and on. His protagonist Sean Phillips ekes out a meagre income from player subscriptions to Trace Italian, “a game of strategy and survival” that Sean invented during the lonely hours he spent in hospital as a teenager following a horrific incident with a gun that leaves him horribly disfigured his face a “strange and terrible” mess of raw flesh and misshapen bones thereafter.
The range of Darnielle’s inventiveness is impressive to say the least. And I'm clearly not the only one to have been blown away by this title since it made the longlist for this year's National Book Award in America, sitting alongside long-time literary heavyweights such as Marilynne Robinson and Richard Powers.
Until now, John Darnielle has been famous for what (undoubtedly inciting the green-eyed monster in many) he terms his "day job" – that of writer, composer, guitarist and vocalist for the band The Mountain Goats – but if his novel Wolf in White Van is a taste of things to come, it looks like, from now on, he's also going to be widely known as an accomplished fiction author, too.
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