Wolf in White Van
The New York Times Bestseller
Long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award in fiction
Winner of the 2015 Alex Award for adult books with special appeal for young adults
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, explorers of the Trace. But when t...
My notes
I grabbed this as a fan of Darnielle's music, and I was a bit hesitant due to buying musicians novels in the past.
Still, I went in largely blind and was pleasantly surprised. Darnielle seemed to have addressed a time and a culture he was familiar with, or familiar enough with to express confidently. The prose is never really verbose, the tone sticks close to the narrator and seems to roughly match the narrator's age.
The story structure was interesting, telling two arcs at two different times, both mostly backwards. There's little in the way of drama or conflict, it's the story of a character living with his thoughts and consequences, and the drama really seems to come from the reader knowing exactly where the story going and dreading going there.