John Darnielle Knihy

Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move. Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of 17, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in Southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian - a text-based, roleplaying game played through the mail - Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America. Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean’s life. Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle’s audacious and gripping debut novel is a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

"An epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, artistic obsession, and the dangers of storytelling"--

Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. Jeremy works there in Nevada, Iowa, during the late 1990s, where the Hollywood Video in Ames looms as a threat. The Video Hut, however, has its regular customers, and for Jeremy, it’s a quiet job that helps him cope with the loss of his mother six years prior. One day, a schoolteacher returns her copy of *Targets*, mentioning there’s something odd about it, but she doesn’t elaborate. Shortly after, another customer returns *She’s All That*, claiming there’s another movie on the tape. Despite his reluctance, Jeremy checks it out and discovers a jarring black-and-white scene in the middle of the film, featuring a barn and faint breathing sounds. This unsettling moment compels him to watch it multiple times. Similar eerie scenes appear on *Targets*, suggesting they share a common origin. The barn resembles one just outside of town, transforming the familiar landscape into something haunting and foreboding. As the unsettling nature of the videos unfolds, Jeremy and the townspeople realize their once-quiet lives are irrevocably changed, filled with loss and instability.

From New York Times bestselling author and Mountain Goats' singer/songwriter John Darnielle - a master at building suspense" ( Los Angeles Times ) - comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, artistic obsession, and the dangers of storytelling in Devil House . Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him. Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success - and movie adaptation - to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house - what the locals call "The Devil House" - in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected - back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is. John Darnielle has long been known to millions of Mountain Goats fans as a storyteller of uncanny sensitivity and mythic power. In Universal Harvester and Wolf in White Van before it, he has proven himself a novelist of the highest order. With Devil House, Darnielle rises above with a novel that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a gripping tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.