No one will ever live that long.” A happy ending is not possible, but outcomes are monitored, losses managed. “Technically, it’s possible to get to the last room … but no one will ever do it.
“The Trace Italian, of course, does not exist,” Sean confides. The diminishing choices lead to catastrophe, never to the mysterious heart of the keep. The first move sets the rest in motion, as doors slam shut like falling dominoes. There is one safe route, all but impossible to find among the traps and blind falls. So he creates a maze he can control and see from end to end. The game reflects Sean’s view that free will and safety are illusionsthat life is a fatal labyrinth. This world exists only insofar as Sean has imagined it. They write back what they want to do and he parses their answer down to one of several branching paths. Trace Italian is more like a mail-based Choose Your Own Adventure book than a stats-and-dice game such as Dungeons & Dragons. Sean’s isolation predated his accident: He grew from a child preoccupied with his imagination into an unpopular teen, friends with another outcast called Teague, with his “ figurines and his bound notebooks bulging with sketches of imaginary mountain ranges or mysteriously numbered dodecahedrons.” His formative fantasies were of a darker version of pulp icon Conan the Barbarian, who haunts the book like some terrible spirit animal. It would have been pat to make the game solely the result of the trauma, but Darnielle complicates it by sowing bitter seeds in Sean’s childhood. We learn early on that one was badly hurt, the other killed, in some way related to the game.Īfter his accident, Sean envisions Trace Italian in a hallucinatory scene rendered like Carlos Castaneda writing the Book of Revelation. Until nearly the end, he withholds the cause of Sean’s injury and the significance of two players named Lance and Carrie. Sean’s recollection tacks backward in time, through hospitals and courtrooms and sad domestic scenes, toward the ground zero of his accident.ĭarnielle mentioned Borgesand Robbe-Grillet in his INDY interview, and he shares their fondness for evocative absence. Otherwise, the suspense derives not from what will happen but what already has.
The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.
0 kommentar(er)
