It is the ideal job for Sean, whose disfigurement is so extreme that he is reluctant to appear in public – let alone do things like speak or smile, which amplify the startling effect of his injuries. But when two devoted players take his game into the real world, a subsequent lawsuit threatens to undo the secondary world he has created for his players (and for himself). Inspired in part by real-life lawsuits in the 1980s over the game Dungeons & Dragons, as well as Judas Priest’s version of the song ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’, the development poses the perennial question of how much pop culture should be held accountable for fans’ actions.

But the lawsuit is only a minor part of the book, which is mostly about locating Sean’s motivation for the self-inflicted ‘accident’ that is so hard for his parents, or anyone else, to understand. Darnielle constructs the book around this one event, moving freely around in time while only very gradually revealing the details of the event. The extreme nature of it, and especially of its aftermath, makes for a harrowing read, but ultimately that is merely the gripping hook with which Darnielle pulls us through the very believable interior life of his protagonist.

John Darnielle (photograph by DL Anderson)

Darnielle spent years as an assistant nurse and counsellor in psychiatric institutions, and his earlier book Master of Reality (2008) – a meditation on the 1971 LP of the same name by Black Sabbath, written for the album-specific book series 33⅓ – dealt with a teenage male in a mental hospital. But despite Sean’s actions, he is not quite the standard ‘troubled’ teenager. While there are warning signs broadcast early on in his childhood play-acting – ‘I ruled a smoking, wrecked kingdom with a hard and deadly hand … It had a soundtrack. All screams’ – he is for the most part relatable and even fairly ‘normal’. Looking back on his accident, he feels the same detachment many of us do with our teenage selves, sharing a certain stretch of memory but little beyond that.

As he does so well in song, Darnielle captures specific worlds with Wolf in White Van. Even if he is working within well-established iconography describing long-haired teenagers smoking on bleachers in Southern California or locating the one shop where a moustache means you don’t get asked for ID while buying beer, his evocation of Sean’s obsession with the Conan books, mail-order sword catalogues, and high-concept B-movies gets a narrower terrain exactly right. Many of us will remember well that sense of feeling our way through formative pop culture, even when we didn’t actually understand why it attracted us in the first place. (That very mystery was a key part of the attraction, of course.)

Again, what impresses most is the sympathetic conveying of Sean’s enclosed personal world, sealed off at age seventeen and never again to approach normality. After Darnielle mined his own volatile past under the influence of drugs and an abusive stepfather on The Mountain Goats albums We Shall All Be Healed (2004) and The Sunset Tree (2005), one might have expected this novel to be more strictly based in autobiography. Yet it feels deeply personal, altering the exact details of youthful escape but not the value of it or the possibility of that escape eclipsing reality altogether. If, in real life, Darnielle survived his various ordeals and found a successful career in music, that makes him no less equipped to imagine what his teenage self could have done to negate that bright future.

It is a risky move, orchestrating a book so that it is working towards a sickening climax we know is coming, but Darnielle handles it with utmost delicacy. The consistent matter-of-fact tone can make Sean’s repeated descriptions of his disfigurement all the more upsetting, but it is a valuable – and very real – surveying of a person’s coming-of-age taking a turn that can never be undone.

Wolf in White Van is a remarkable novel for a writer so new to the form. Then again, considering how well the book tunes into the most acute details of life, especially a teenager’s difficulty explaining his or her own motivation, it is not such a surprise that it came from someone with a songwriter’s keen ear.