The narrator of Wolf in White Van was disfigured in an accident as a teenager and now lives an isolated life running a play-by-mail adventure game. The story time skips from the present back to prior snippets of the narrator’s life and small pieces of the adventure game’s text scattered throughout, making the whole thing disorienting, especially early on as you learn how the narrator sees the world.
The book feels an awful lot like a great Mountain Goats song, taking you on a journey with a defective and untrustworthy narrator down into depths that you would never want to experience yourself, but you are glad that someone else took the trip and came back to tell you about it. There’s very little plot here and the endpoint is clear from page one — we’re just here to live inside the narrator’s strange world for a while.