Wolf in White Van: A Novel by John Darnielle has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine.
Wolf in White Van: A Novel by John Darnielle has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine.
Wolf in White Van is narrated by its protagonist, Sean Phillips, and does not follow a linear plot line. Instead, it skips between the present, when Sean is an adult; the past, when he is 17; and his inner thoughts where he has created a role-playing game called Trace Italian. This review will summarize the plot as a whole, and not in the order that these points are presented in the book.
At 17, Sean tries to commit suicide by holding a shotgun under his chin and pulling the trigger. Although this scene isn’t depicted until the last page, it is the inciting incident in Sean’s life. Throughout the book he contemplates his reason for the act, but never reveals whether it was to achieve some kind of notoriety or to escape a future of unknowns.
Sean barely survives the shotgun blast and spends months in the hospital and then a rehabilitation facility recovering. Much of that time is spent lying immobile in a hospital bed. As a way to make the time pass, Sean begins creating another world in his head.
In it, some kind of nuclear accident has crippled the United States, leaving it in chaos. Mutant humanoids from the coasts now roam inland, looking to consume uncontaminated flesh. Over hundreds of years, the surviving humans build a huge complex, the Trace Italian, in Kansas. This star-shaped stronghold protects the remaining survivors and serves as a beacon to those still in desolation.
The only friend that visits Sean in the hospital is Kimmy, a girl he made out with the night he shot himself. His parents are convinced the two of them had a murder-suicide pact that Kimmy reneged on. Sean tries to convince them he acted on his own. Kimmy eventually stops coming to visit, and Sean is never sure whether his parents stopped her.
After almost a year, Sean is released from the hospital. At first, he returns to his parents’ home where his father has to carry him from room to room because Sean’s wheelchair won’t fit in the house. After a year of therapy, when he is able to walk again, Sean gets an apartment of his own.
Unfortunately, Sean’s face has been permanently disfigured by the blast, leaving him to live a solitary life away from public scrutiny. He used his time in his parents’ house to develop his role-playing game called Trace Italian. He takes out ads in various magazines. After a free trial, participants pay a fee to continue receiving moves by mail. Although he developes a few other games, Trace Italian gives him the most income.
Sean has changed since his “accident,” as he calls it, and from his time in rehabilitation. He doesn’t go into detail as to what motivates him now, but present-day Sean is a caring young man who goes out of his way to put people at ease on the few occasions he leaves his home.
He is devastated when he learns that a teenager who played Trace Italian died when she and her boyfriend tried to find the imaginary stronghold. Her boyfriend is still recovering from his injuries, having suffered severe frostbite. They had spent several nights on the harsh Kansas plains. The girl’s parents try to sue Sean for her death, but a judge throws out the case.
Throughout the rest of the book, Sean tells stories relating to people outside his home, remembering moves that people made within Trace Italian, recalling the time leading up to his suicide attempt and the years of recovery. None of these incidences move the plot, but they do illuminate his state of mind before, during and since the accident.
A visiting nurse comments about Jesus always making a way in tough situations. A character thanks God. A church holds a fundraiser to help pay the medical costs for the teen with frostbite. People send letters to Sean after the girl dies that say their prayer groups were interceding on his behalf.
Sean recalls watching a late-night religious program when he was a teenager. He found it intriguing because the show seemed to follow the same script every night with few variations. Several shows talked about satanic messages encoded in rock music, only understandable when the record is played backward. Wolf in white van was one of the messages.
When Sean calls into the show and pretends to be possessed, a receptionist prays for Satan to release him in Jesus’ name. Graffiti on the walls of a gas station within Trace Italian state that Jesus is Lord.
Sean says his parents weren’t Christians. Kimmy says that she believes Jesus is Lord, but Sean doesn’t know what he believes about Christ. For him, the name has a mystical quality, but he doesn’t have faith.
Throughout the book there are subtle digs toward Christians and Christianity. The religious show Sean watches seems contrived, and some of the mail he receives after the teenager dies is from Christians who threaten his life.
Sean recalls seeing the house of a palm-reader in his town. He puts an astrologer’s shack into his game. The heavy metal music he listened to in the past gave him a kind of religious experience — it transported him from his thoughts and the constant noise in his mind.
In high school he believed if you stepped on the multi-sided star in the mosaic that was outside the Chamber of Commerce, you would have bad luck. Sean thinks that God is something you believe in when you’re grown up and not afraid of your father anymore. You make God into what you need.
Sean’s parents are seen as loving but ineffectual. Sean’s mother tries to reach out to him during his dark teenage years, but the attempts are awkward. His parents help him through his recovery, but seem to have little contact with him as an adult.
God’s name is used as an exclamation with the words thank and knows. Jesus Christ is used in vain. The f-word is used with you, ‘em, face and up. Other profanity includes bulls—, s—, a–hole, d–k, and d–khead. Other objectionable words include tits and suck.
Young Sean has a vivid and dark imagination. As a child, he played by himself and imagined he was a variation of the comic book character Conan. But Sean’s Conan was a cruel and violent leader, ordering people to death for no reason. In his mind, he imagined people screaming as they were burned alive. Some were flayed and eaten.
As a teenager, before he shoots himself, Sean imagines being Conan, only this time shooting his parents or slicing his neighbors with swords. Sean gives a graphic description in his game of the radiation sickness that killed much of humanity. He recalls the game-play of someone named Chris. Sean enjoyed Chris’ letters and moves but one day receives a letter in which Chris said the game had gotten into his head and he had to end his playing. He pleads with Sean to let him do this and then writes about killing himself by plunging a knife into his neck. Sean doesn’t believe Chris actually killed himself; he just needs to stop playing the game.
Sean imagines what it was like as the teenagers slowly froze on the Kansas plains. He details the injuries to his face as two strangers ask to see it up close, including the fact that he no longer has a nose but a recessed pit. Sean remembers the story of a singer who blew out his brains on his driveway. Kimmy tells Sean that an old friend was shot over drugs.
Sean and Kimmy kiss passionately the night he tries to kill himself. She put his hand down her pants. Sean sees dirty magazines on the rack of the liquor store. He says they spark a memory, but doesn’t say more.
Author note: John Darnielle, the author, is a musician in the band Mountain Goats.
Drinking: Sean goes to a liquor store to buy candy. Teens in the parking lot drink beer. One talks about staying high for as long as he can.
Smoking: The teens in the parking lot smoke cigarettes. Sean tells of smoking cigarettes as a teenager.
Drugs: Kimmy tells Sean that one of their high school friends became an addict and was shot over drugs.
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