- FSG
- Wolf in White Van is great.
Last June, two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin were charged with homicide in the first degree after allegedly stabbing a friend. A baffling part of their story—which blew up the Internet, as gory and strange tales are wont to do—was their defense. They alleged that they stabbed this other girl to please a fictional mythological creepy-crawly they’d found out about online, the Slender Man. After the girls were charged, the people behind Creepypasta Wiki, where the (fictional) Slender Man legend was propagated, released the following statement (excerpted):
ALL WORKS PRESENTED ON THIS WIKI AND OTHER SITES (INCLUDING SLENDERMAN, JEFF THE KILLER, BEN, SONIC.EXE, ETC) ARE FICTIONAL STORIES AND CHARACTERS.
If you want to read more about the Slender Man or cases like it, that’s basically why Gawker was invented. But if you’re interested in a more nuanced, less sensational take on similar territory, I cannot recommend John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van highly enough.
Wolf in White Van is the story of Sean, a man who attempted suicide as a teenager, survived, and has lived with the disfiguring consequences ever since. His life is one of quiet, not completely miserable isolation spent buying early-morning candy from liquor stores, watching terrible science fiction on VHS, and making shrewd observations about the way people see him (or don’t). Sean actually lives mostly inside of a game called Trace Italian, an analog RPG played via the US Postal Service. Sean’s imaginary world is lovingly, carefully constructed, and he feels a sense of fondness for the people he guides through it, move by move, even though he has never met them and never will.
Are you crying yet? No? Okay, it gets worse. Throughout Wolf in White Van, Trace Italian is on trial both literally and figuratively after two teenagers, sucked into the game, mistake it for reality and end up ruining several lives, and there’s an allegation that Sean is responsible. This is familiar subject matter for Darnielle, whose last book, Black Sabbath: Master of Reality, is about a kid in a psychiatric hospital who escapes from his grim reality by way of Black Sabbath. It’s also just a familiar, frequent narrative that plays out on the mercilessly quick Internet news cycle whenever someone’s private disconnect from reality becomes a public spectacle when it leads to death or explodes into violence. Think of the Slender Man case, or the professional gamer in South Korea who died in 2005 after playing Starcraft for 50 hours, or even the astronaut Lisa Nowak, who in 2007 turned a woman she’d never met into a rival deserving of kidnapping. These stories are often framed as cautionary tales, feeding all those well-intended thinkpieces on whether video games or movies or expletive-laden music causes IRL violence.
But Sean’s story isn’t one of these, and if there’s a political statement to be gleaned from Wolf in White Van, it’s that games and movies and music do more good than harm, that they are, in fact, vital to staying alive. At its heart, Wolf in White Van is not a story about redemption so much as survival; there’s no melodrama, just the everyday logistics of living with a permanent reminder of the worst thing you’ve ever done, and observations about the way most people live their lives that can only come from someone for whom such normalcy is impossible. Throughout, we’re guided by Sean’s distinctive, wonderful voice, sad but not despairing, full of insight but never cloying, delivered in clean, unadorned, unsentimental language. Which all makes sense, because John Darnielle wrote it. Fans of the Mountain Goats will probably love this book; so will anyone who cares about good prose.
John Darnielle reads at tonight at Powell’s City of Books (1005 W Burnside) at 7:30 pm.