7. Wolf in White Van

By John Darnielle                   

Disappointing.

Here I am exactly three years later retroactively adding this as an entry and I cannot for the life of me recall what this novel was about.  It has such a great cover though.

Author John Darnielle is also known as a key member of the music band, The Mountain Goats, a self-described "indie rock icon whose vaguely anguished and kinda pissed-off voice is instantly recognizable."

 

According to Wikipedia, Wolf in White Van tells the story of Sean Phillips, a reclusive game designer whose face has been severely disfigured. The plot, which is told non-chronologically, alternates between Sean's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to describe the circumstances surrounding the incident that disfigured him (he shot himself in the head when he was 17). 

 

While recuperating in the hospital, Sean develops the play-by-mail role-playing game,Trace Italian, from which he earns a small income. The objective of Trace Italian is to traverse a post-apocalyptic United States and locate a fortress after which the game is named—a fortress that Sean claims no player will ever penetrate. Sean describes the correspondence he has with players, in particular two teenage players who attempt to carry out the game's actions in real life. One dies and the other is injured, and Sean is charged in court by the players' parents but is found not guilty.

 

The title Wolf in White Van is a reference to the practice of backmasking, hiding messages in audio or visual media, as the phrase "wolf in white van" can allegedly be heard when the Larry Norman song "Six, Sixty, Six" is played in reverse.

 

I don’t know what was disappointing about Wolf in White Van for me.  There were some cool ideas and the writing was good, but there was a self-consciousness and faux angstiness that just didn’t work for me.

 

 

6. Through Black Spruce

By Joseph Boyden

Picked this up at a secondhand book shop in Charlottetown a couple of years after reading the excellent Three Day Road.  I think I would have read this sooner had I not learned about the controversy of Boyden’s indigenous ancestry, which blew up in 2016.  I remember talking about this with an old friend who was visiting from Winnipeg. 

She still recommended that I read Through Black Spruce, saying if I liked Three Day Road, I’ll like this one too, as she thought TBS was even better. 

So I finally gave it a go, and was disappointed with the book as a whole.  Although it was meant to be a follow up, as the son of the protagonist from TDR, Will Bird, is now an old bush pilot who spends most of the novel in a coma at the hospital. The narrative weaves between Will's life before his accident and his niece Annie, who is looking for her sister, a model who went missing in NYC. 

As you can tell from the summary,   was not like Three Day Road - at all. It was inferior in every way, from narrative cohesian, characterization and quality of writing. The one aspect I did appreciate was seeing how First Nations characters who are at home in the wilds, but can also navigate the urban streets of Toronto and social in-circles of Manhattan. 

But compared to brilliance of Three Day Road, I found Through Black Spruce rather superficial, lifeless and boring.  I had trouble getting into the character of Annie.  The writing was very distant and unrelatable, and because I didn't really care what would happen, I had to force myself to finish the book.