Wolf in White Van

Sean Phillips lives isolated with a caretaker after a gunshot at seventeen left his face permanently disfigured, spending his days running Trace Italian, a play-by-mail post-apocalyptic role-playing game he designed and mails out to subscribers by hand. Told out of order across his childhood, adolescence, and adult isolation, the novel circles back toward the ambiguous circumstances of his self-inflicted injury.

When two teenage players take Trace Italian's fiction into the real world, with tragic consequences — one dead, one badly hurt — Sean is dragged into a lawsuit that forces him, and the reader, to confront what role his game and his own damage played in what happened. John Darnielle's debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, is a meditation on escapism, trauma, and the stories we build to survive.