John Darnielle, Wolf In White Van (2014)

I might say 'I enjoyed this', except that 'enjoy' doesn't seem the right word, exactly. For a first novel it's a very accomplished piece of work indeed: sensitively, evocatively and occasionally alarmingly written. It is eerie and weird and sticks in the mind after reading, like a piece of pungently delicious food sticks in the teeth. Quite apart from anything else, it offers a portrait of the inward oddness of the SF fan (the crossover between SF and gaming especially) a healthy distance away from the rather self-congratulatory cosiness of Jo Walton's Hugo-winning Amongst Others. There's little to love and much to recognise in this portrait of what it means to be a geek. Wolf In White Van shares with Walton's book a deliberately aimless structure, and little actually happens in it. A better book, though, I think.

Story: our narrator, Sean, lives alone in Californian suburbia, coping with the consequences of some terrible incident in his youth that left his face hideously disfigured. A nurse calls four times a day to check on him and top up his treatment. The rest of the time he runs a retro-style, postal-only role-playing game called 'Trace Italian': people write to Sean detailing their next move in the post-nuclear-disaster dystopia of his game-space, and he writes back with personalised details as to how their game is going. The novel is written, in a sinuous sort of way, backwards: so we start at the end, rewind through the story of two teenage players of Trace Italian who confused the game and reality and suffered (one died, one badly hurt) as a result, and end up with the initial trauma that wrecked Sean's face. Along the way are some beautifully written excursi on solitude, imagination, science fiction and games -- the stuff on the porousness of game-players' sense of game and world struck me, post-Gamergate, as prescient (Sean has a thing for Conan, and also for John Norman's Gor novels, although not to read, just to stare at their 'shamesful and garish' covers, 'pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way': 'I didn't need to hear the stories the books were trying to tell me: their skins haunted me enough' [49]). Sometimes these excursi drag a little, but often they are marvellous embedded essays on the side of being a genre Fan upon which Amongst Others prefers not to dwell. Sean is keen not to be thought a creep and a freak, and works hard not to be; but there is something creepy about him nonetheless, and as you read through the novel it starts to dawn upon you that this freakishness is nothing to do with his ruined face or hermit existence. It's the freakishness he shares with you: the combination of desire to escape and desire to control, the passion, passivity and hatred of being passive, the strange potage of imagination, generosity, anger and perversity that is mixed in the head of the true science fiction geek. I know whereof I speak.

It's a novel about SF rather than a SF novel, without even the set-dressing of magic that made Amongst Others Hugo-acceptable. But it's a very, very good novel for all that.

Downsides: Darnielle is, perhaps, a little too obviously coy about withholding the precise details of the 'event' that led to young Sean Phillips's disfigurement. Sometimes the prose strays into mere whimsy (though this is rare). And, though the blame for this can't be laid at Darnielle's door, that cover is rather too EEEEEK! for my taste. In fact, if you stare at it, and rotate it slowly through 35° you find yourself feeling physically nauseous.