New Releases by John Darnielle

Collected and annotated lyrics from one of music''s most visionary bards, John Darnielle. A work of rapturous beauty, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of John Darnielle through his most meaningful songs. From his early days recording on a boom box, through the evolution of the Mountain Goats from a solo project to a full band, to his continued influence on indie music, This Year pairs the definitive texts of 365 John Darnielle songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. These commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his family and friends; his wife, Lalitree Darnielle; his longtime collaborator, Peter Hughes; and even his literary heroes, among many others. Here are the origins of “This Year,” “No Children,” “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” and “Up the Wolves,” as well as Darnielle’s literary influences, including Flannery O’Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King. This Year, spanning decades, becomes the definitive literary record of one of the greatest songwriters and musical creative forces of all time.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. 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. Devil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

«Va tutto bene, mamma» dissi. «Ho paura che sarai solo» disse lei, piangeva. «Sarò solo in ogni caso.» Non intendevo dirlo con quel tono ma mi uscì così, e d''altra parte era la verità. Sfigurato da un incidente da quando aveva diciassette anni, Sean Phillips vive nel suo minuscolo appartamento in una cittadina del Sud della California. Isolato tra quelle mura, costruisce mondi possibili, orchestra avventure fantastiche per i tanti sconosciuti a cui piace perdersi nei giochi di ruolo. Traccia Italiana è la sua ultima creazione: si gioca per corrispondenza, ogni lettera una mossa, a cui Sean risponde presentando scenari sempre nuovi, avventure in un''America del futuro devastata e imbarbarita. Lo scopo del gioco è uno solo: trovare un rifugio, e conservarlo, fino a raggiungere l''ultima fortezza, il santuario, la salvezza. Lance e Carrie, invece, frequentano un liceo in Florida. Giocano a Traccia Italiana, e sono convinti che quell''universo immaginario si possa trasportare nel mondo reale. Un errore che sarà loro fatale, e di cui Sean sarà chiamato a rispondere davanti a un giudice. Da quei giorni in tribunale inizia il suo racconto, un viaggio indietro nel tempo fino al momento in cui lui stesso, per primo, decise di staccarsi dal mondo degli altri. Un romanzo innovativo, costruito con grande maestria e impreziosito da un finale che è anche climax e innesco degli eventi che hanno dato forma definitiva alla vita di Sean. Il lupo nel furgone bianco è un esordio folgorante, una storia delicata e al tempo stesso penetrante sull''emarginazione e il desiderio di fuggire dalla realtà proprio dell''adolescenza; già libro di culto in America, annovera tra i suoi più convinti estimatori il Premio Pulitzer Donna Tartt.

New York Times Bestseller "A moving, beautifully etched picture of America’s lost and profoundly lonely." —Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature “Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it’s nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it’s a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.” —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times “Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread.” —Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets—an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.” Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There are no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation—the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing— but there are some recognizable landmarks. These have been shot just outside of town. In Universal Harvester, the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain. “This chilling literary thriller follows a video store clerk as he deciphers a macabre mystery through clues scattered among the tapes his customers rent. A page-tuning homage to In Cold Blood and The Ring.” —O: The Oprah Magazine “[Universal Harvester is] so wonderfully strange, almost Lynchian in its juxtaposition of the banal and the creepy, that my urge to know what the hell was going on caused me to go full throttle . . . [But] Darnielle hides so much beautiful commentary in the book’s quieter moments that you would be remiss not to slow down.” —Abram Scharf, MTV News “Universal Harvester is a novel about noticing hidden things, particularly the hurt and desperation that people bear under their exterior of polite reserve . . . Mr. Darnielle possesses the clairvoyant’s gift for looking beneath the surface.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Universal Harvester is] constantly unnerving, wrapped in a depressed dread that haunts every passage. But it all pays off with surprising emotionality.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

À dix-sept ans, Sean est défiguré. Sous l’effet des pilules analgésiques ingurgitées trois fois par jour, son imaginaire – nourri des lectures de Conan le Barbare, des fanzines de science-fiction ou de musique rock – s’enflamme : il crée Trace Italian, un jeu de rôle par correspondance dans lequel les joueurs cherchent un abri dans une Amérique postapocalyptique. Reclus dans sa maison du sud californien, Sean, devenu adulte, reçoit un jour une lettre d’injures le tenant pour responsable de la mort de deux adolescents qui ont voulu transposer Trace Italian dans le monde réel. Ce drame réactive chez lui des souvenirs enfouis. Dans le labyrinthe de sa mémoire, il tente, à travers des événements anodins, de comprendre comment certains choix ont pu bouleverser toute sa vie. Le Loup dans le camion blanc est une histoire envoûtante, à la fois sombre et brillante, débordante d’imprévu, de solitude et de fuite.

Seans gezicht raakte door een ongeluk in zijn jeugd zwaar verminkt. Tijdens zijn lange revalidatie bedacht hij een ingenieuze game, die door aanwijzingen van hem via de post wordt gespeeld. De spelers sturen steeds per brief hun keuze uit Seans vier aanwijzingen. Als je strategisch kiest, blijf je leven in het spel en kun je het verborgen bolwerk in Seans fantasiewereld bereiken. Twee pubers zijn er echter van overtuigd dat Seans verbeelding geen fantasie maar werkelijkheid is en trekken eropuit. Ze weten niet dat Sean door zijn misvorming de echte wereld nooit heeft gezien. Pas als ze zijn vier aanwijzingen negeren en een vijfde aanwijzing aan Sean sturen, beseft hij waar ze mee bezig zijn. In dit weergaloze debuut stelt Darnielle zijn stijl ten dienste van het verhaal. Trefzeker laat hij zien hoe de onzekerheid van pubers vreselijke gevolgen kan hebben.

Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle''s audacious and gripping debut novel Wolf in White Van is a marvel of storytelling and genuine literary delicacy. 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 seventeen, 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. His primary creation, Trace Italian, is an intricate text-role playing game that enables participants far and wide to explore a dystopian America, seeking refuge amidst the ruin. However, when two high school players, Lance and Carrie, extend the game into their reality, the consequences are horrifying, leaving Sean to account for it. Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van invites us to comprehend the depth and intricacy of Sean''s life. Told in reverse, the story draws us back to the moment that fundamentally altered Sean’s life as he knows it.

Black Sabbath''s Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it''s a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who''ve felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John Darnielle hears it through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes.