John Darnielle Knihy

Describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985.

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.

Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar; he likes his boss, Sarah Jane, and it gets him out of the house, which has felt desolate and empty since his mother died six years before. But when Stephanie Parsons, a local schoolteacher, comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint -- 'There's something on it,' she says. Two days later, Lindsey Redinius brings back 'She's all that' and complains that something is wrong -- 'There's another movie on this tape.' Curious, Jeremy takes a look and what he sees on the videos is so strange and disturbing that it propels him out of his comfortable routine and into a search for the tape's creator. As the once-peaceful fields and barns surrounding Nevada begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking

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