Paperback, 224 pages
Published Aug. 31, 2015 by Picador USA, Picador.
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.
I enjoyed Universal Harvester and was looking forward to this book, but it didn't do anything for me. I found it unengaging, wordy and vague.
i am somewhere between the ages of Sean-as-he-is-now and Sean-as-he-was-then & i relate to them both, in different ways. I don't think John Darnielle ever forgot what it was like to be a teenager.
Definite CW for suicide.
Wolf in White Van is a tale about loneliness and normality. There are three or four layers to this story which are equally powerful, the plot and subplot interlace naturally as part of the same story and the jumps back and forth are almost indistinguishable. I think the confusion on the narrative is on purpose, because, the same way the protagonist of the book is often lost and clueless, the reader is as well. This established, for me, a sense of connection with the main character that is difficult to convey in many narratives.
Sean, the main character, manages a mail based MMORPG called Trace Italian. The stories that run in parallel there seem to be representations of himself, how he's out of answers of what he has done, or how he left some of his beloved ones behind while he survived, deeply injured for life. It is amazing the …
Wolf in White Van is a tale about loneliness and normality. There are three or four layers to this story which are equally powerful, the plot and subplot interlace naturally as part of the same story and the jumps back and forth are almost indistinguishable. I think the confusion on the narrative is on purpose, because, the same way the protagonist of the book is often lost and clueless, the reader is as well. This established, for me, a sense of connection with the main character that is difficult to convey in many narratives.
Sean, the main character, manages a mail based MMORPG called Trace Italian. The stories that run in parallel there seem to be representations of himself, how he's out of answers of what he has done, or how he left some of his beloved ones behind while he survived, deeply injured for life. It is amazing the subtleness that the author comes up with, and organically, you find yourself in the middle of everything.
Certainly not a book for everyone, and not for anytime.
i couldn’t put this down and the prose is very fine. but be warned it is in first person with an unreliable narrator. he omits things, and perhaps even lies by omission. so read this as if you are playing a game with someone you care about and find fascinating — but can’t trust to be completely forthcoming.
This is easily the best book I've read this year; probably the best book I've read in the last five. It's so strange to see so many pieces from my own adolescence arranged in such a heartbreaking fashion. Of course a person whose own life was defined by one single decision would create a game with virtually unlimited decisions for other lonely, lost people. I wish I could write a more cogent review, but frankly, I'm still kind of a blubbering mess.
A first-person non-linear tale of an adolescent tragedy with physical deformity and chronic illness told in a background of rock and roll music (the author is a musician), an escapist text-based adventure game, and an underlying palpable creepy angst. Most of the dramatic tension is generated artificially by the slow revelation of the nature of an initial past event. Is there anything here when you are all done? Not for me, but it is well written.
I liked a lot of this, but I found it ultimately unsatisfying.
Lyrical and interesting, as I'd expect from JD. I listened to the audiobook, and I think his weird rhythm suited the prose. Not my favorite book of the year, but I enjoyed it.
As with a lot of great magic systems and world-building in fantasy/sci-fi, Trace Italian itself seemed interesting enough for its own book.
3.5 stars. I'm a huge Mountain Goats fan, and I love the way you can really hear John Darnielle's voice in the writing. The main character would not be out of place in one of his songs. I enjoyed the way the story unravels, and the way that I could see the end coming, but was still surprised by the turns along the way. The best way I can think to describe it is that it's a choose-your-own-adventure story in reverse. It's also short (just over 200 pages), so easy to pick up and finish in a couple of days, if you're on the fence about it.
I've never read anything like it - fascinating!
