They are searching for the sanctuary of the Trace Italian, a fortress in the Kansas desert, though no one has ever made it that far. In the game, players make their way across an irradiated, post-apocalyptic Middle America. After all, what is life but a scrupulously detailed, real-time Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story with actual death at the end of its infinite plotlines, most of which you will never see?ĭisfigured by a terrible accident - or it might be more accurate to say incident - in his teens, Sean lives as a recluse and manages a text-based roleplaying game, Trace Italian, through the mail. It's both a pitch-perfect description of the past - an endless maze of untapped choices - and a subtle articulation of one of Wolf's central themes: the way a role-playing game can parallel a person's real life. "They open onto their own clusters of new ones, and there's an end somewhere, I'm sure, but I'll never see it." "There are several possibilities," he tells us of a hallway in his family's home, with its many doors and secrets. In the opening chapter of Wolf in White Van, the debut novel from singer-songwriter John Darnielle, protagonist Sean Phillips descends into a memory, and imagines other paths within it. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Wolf in White Van Author John Darnielle
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |