Sean’s injury limits his ability to perform some tasks and he lives in chronic pain.

As an adult, he participates in the world primarily as the master and inventor of an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, Trace Italian, that people play through the mail. Told in a tricky, deftly structured reverse chronology, the narrator, Sean Phillips, backtracks to a traumatic teenaged event: the gun incident that sets him up for life as a dramatically disfigured recluse. Wolf in White Van is a novel that unspools rather than reads. As Martin Seay wrote in his recent article on the power of this one single song, for The Believer, “Here, as elsewhere, Darnielle’s angry, earnest, defiantly uncool project is to reclaim for awkward adolescence - which has no escape route, no better option than to stand its ground and reject what would assimilate it - the moral authority that is its rightful due.”

Once you’ve heard the fuzzy, tape recorded voice of John Darnielle hissing “Hail Satan” over his single, forcefully strummed acoustic guitar a few dozen times, the hopes of young Jeff and Cyrus will become a part of you, no matter how you feel about pentagrams. Consider, by way of example, Jeff and Cyrus, “a couple of guys who’d been friends since grade school,” who are the subjects of the first song on The Mountain Goat’s 2002 album All Hail West Texas. More than the lyricism of his work, Darnielle is known for the power of storytelling and myth-making in his songs, and has crafted characters that live on in the hearts of fans the world over. The power of Darnielle’s lyrics are such that it’s not hard to envision his name on the historic list of our most highly honored poets. In October 2012, a few thousand people signed a petition for the White House to bestow on him the same honors once held by Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mark Strand, and Louise Gluck. As the sole founder of the beloved indie folk band The Mountain Goats, John Darnielle is no stranger to touching people with his words - in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones once called him “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist.” Wolf in White Van is the first novel from the man who might’ve been the Poet Laureate of the United States of America, despite having only really written songs about lonely people and monsters. The Mountain Goats, Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton Will in time both outpace and outlive you The best ever death metal band out of Denton

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream

Wolf in white van by john darnielle