First published 2014
Sean Phillips sits in his small Southern California apartment, writing letters to strangers around the world. He creates Trace Italian, a mail-based role-playing game set in a devastated future America where players search for safety in a brutal landscape. Sean has lived in isolation since a disfiguring injury at seventeen left him withdrawn from ordinary life. Through his game, he guides participants through imaginary dangers and discoveries, turn by turn, letter by letter. Two Florida high school students, Lance and Carrie, play his game with particular intensity. When they decide to act out their fantasy adventures in real life, something goes terribly wrong. Sean faces questions about his responsibility for what happened to them. The investigation forces him to revisit his past, moving backward through time toward the moment that changed everything. The story unravels in reverse, revealing how Sean came to live apart from the world most people inhabit, until it reaches the violent incident that shaped his entire existence.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Southern California
Period: 21st-century
211 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: mental-illness