ONCE, AS A CHILD, I had visions. This took place in a children’s hospital decorated with murals of sea creatures. During the several hours I was in surgery, they had come alive. An octopus crawled along the plaster. A sea dragon undulated. I might have been frightened, except the ocean in the walls simply confirmed a phenomenon I already knew to be true: it was evidence, as Nick, the fifteen-year-old narrator of Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan, might say, of “the beautiful glow of something you didn’t have to open your eyes to see.”
A celebrated memoirist and literary scholar, Clune, professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University, has spent his career in the search and study of these liminal spaces—transcendental slivers of experience that are at once out-of-body and deeply in or with the spirit of the sublime. He is a writer in awe of the human capacity to fabricate “a different level of reality” and the portals—which he has previously located in literature, video games, childhood, and drugs—that briefly enable this. The second of Clune’s two memoirs, Gamelife (2015), is dedicated to the transporting power of early computer games, such as Oregon Trail, that obsessed him as a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs: “When I was eleven, computer games taught me how to imagine something so it lasts, so it feels real.” They were a kind of training ground for raw imagination that was otherwise left “fumbl[ing] outside reality like a child at a locked door.” The best games, he found, were even capable of rivaling his attachment to the real world.
This fascination with heightened or otherwise manipulated states of consciousness was also central to Clune’s first memoir, the cult classic White Out (2013), about his addiction to heroin while a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. The drug was so insidious in part because it was too lasting, too real, overwriting—not unlike the “gameworld”—all other social and material relations. While the initial dopamine surge from a pop song fades with repeated listening, Clune explains, to the addict, the lure of the first hit of actual dope reigns eternal; shooting up is forever “like picking up a white phone, and the angel of the first time is singing down the line.” These memorable descriptions of what it’s like to have an angel-shaped portal punched through your consciousness complement Clune’s academic work, where he suggests that our desire to access and prolong elevated experiences—even to escape linear time altogether—is perhaps better satisfied through art. As he argues in his monograph Writing Against Time (2013), “A central criterion for artistic success . . . is the extent to which a work produces and preserves the effect of a first impression.”
Perhaps this is why we say we “envy” someone who has yet to read a book we ourselves admire. Pan, for me, has become one of those rare, enduring finds.
ON THE SURFACE, Pan is the coming-of-age story of an ordinary teenage boy struggling with severe panic attacks while doing ordinary teenage things (losing his virginity, fretting over his popularity, negotiating rides to strip malls in the wake of his parents’ divorce) in suburban Illinois. On another level, it’s about a teenager who has possibly been possessed by Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild, and who falls in with a cult of troubled young drug addicts who attempt to exorcise him.
Nick is initially concerned his “mental illness” will seem “weird.” He has reason to worry—and I am protective enough of the strange, idiosyncratic beauty of this book to worry in turn that some readers might not be up to the challenge of following his more baroque trains of thought. Precociously philosophical, Nick is the kind of fifteen-year-old who tunes out in geometry class while mentally plotting his experiences along axes named “OPEN/CLOSED.” He spends a great deal of time wondering where thoughts come from, convinced that his own feel like flies “bumping along the underside of my scalp.” Alongside the “theory of Pan”—the idea that panic is akin to being possessed by a pagan god—he develops a psychological diagnosis of “Solid Mind,” an inscrutable personality type, definitely not in the DSM, used as a catchall for people who are impervious to panic. The Nicks of the world, by contrast, apparently less “solid,” are more receptive to metaphysical premonitions that induce anxiety: “At age fifteen,” he explains, “I still had a living connection with one element of the childhood world: prophecy.” For those willing to entertain Nick’s private philosophies, Pan is the literary equivalent of a benevolent acid trip, leaving all your mental furniture rearranged.
At the very start of the book, Nick is living with his father in Libertyville after being kicked out of his mother’s house; Nick’s “behavior was getting out of control,” a cursory reference to domestic turmoil that is, with a teenage knack for dismissal, quickly dropped. Life with Dad is turning out to be a low-grade nightmare of impermanence—a spiritual homelessness—at least as filtered through Nick’s deadpan humor, which tends toward morbid hyperbole. The neighborhood, called “Chariot Courts,” is “cheap” and “exposed,” as if it might be swept away by the elements. It seems to Nick that anyone—or anything—could afford to move in at any time. His best friend and foil, Ty, agrees:
“Wind could afford it,” I said. “Trash.”
“Remember that Styrofoam cup we found in your living room?” Ty said. “And no one knew how it got there?”
“Anything can come in,” I said.
“If it wants to,” he said.
The neighborhood’s rare sturdy and impermeable elements, like the wrought iron mailboxes (“They came from the eternal motionless past”), the subdivision’s fairy-tale name, or the metal gate that guards the entrance, constitute its few redeeming charms: “In a spiritual sense they were the heaviest objects around,” Nick reflects. The imposing gate takes on special metaphorical importance. A stand-alone fixture unattached to any surrounding fence, it can be easily circumvented. And yet you can never pass through it, as Nick and Ty find out one evening while drunk, when Ty’s efforts to force it open prove useless.
Questions of permeability will become important to Nick in his descent into panic: How do you let some thoughts in while keeping others out? How do you devise a stable form for your own consciousness, without totally closing yourself off from the “real” world? How to remain both “open” and “closed” at once?
Nick’s panic attacks escalate, leading to emergency room visits, psychiatrist appointments, paranoia, and chronic insomnia. Any reasonable adult who has ever stumbled across the name “Freud” might attribute Nick’s anxiety to the upheaval at home—but Nick is not an adult. Nor, while steeped in the gameworld of Pan, are we. The book cleaves so closely to the childhood logic of magic and “prophecy” that both reader and protagonist wholly believe that he has been possessed by the titular Greek god, who serves as the etymological root of the English word “panic.” Nick’s girlfriend, Sarah, attempting to help, discovers the connection in an encyclopedia in the school library one sexually charged afternoon.
Here’s where things get truly weird. Sarah’s discovery becomes a doorway into an extended encounter with the occult as she, Nick, and Ty fall in with a group of equally lost, spiritually hungry teens eager to believe that Nick is pandemonium personified, possessed by the Greek god, and can put everyone else vicariously in touch with an ancient, more supernatural world. The crew is led by Ian, a University of Pennsylvania junior who’s been suspended for the semester, and Ian’s ultracool younger brother, Tod, who is in Nick’s class at school. The brothers are rich, living on an extensive property that includes an old barn they’ve fashioned into a clubhouse. The barn becomes a regular hangout where, for the next year, everyone but Ian and panicked Nick (who already feels he is about to “come out of [his] head”) indulge in copious amounts of drugs.
While high, the semireligious cult engages in pagan rites led by the increasingly sinister Ian, who tries to explain and cure Nick’s own anxiety through traditions that, as true acolyte Sarah explains, are “from Pan’s time, like.” Everyone participates—but the rituals are seemingly designed for Nick alone. As Nick himself acknowledges: “I had become a semisacred personage in the Barn.” The rituals do seem to help, though he has trouble explaining how or why. Meanwhile, his attempts to describe his capital P “Panic,” which he finds (not unlike a drug-induced epiphany) so difficult to translate into words, invest the others’ lives with a sense of residual magic.
Is this healthy? Of course not! Wouldn’t Nick, Ian, and the rest be better off seeing psychiatrists? The dark magic the novel borrows from Pan is so persuasive that the reader forgets to ask such reasonable questions until Clune begins dropping hints that Nick’s peers are even more troubled than he is. A hopeless boy named Larry will grow up to stab his ex-girlfriend’s new partner; Ian is eventually expelled from Penn for driving his girlfriend “crazy” (she’s committed to a psychiatric hospital); Tod and a young woman named Steph become embroiled in an unknown crime whose consequences leave Tod under house arrest and disappear Steph from Libertyville forever. In one of the most adult scenes between the two best friends, Ty confesses to Nick that his father beats his mother so brutally he once carved a scar into her back with a knife. For almost the entire novel, this brutality—call it “real life”—is pushed to the very periphery of the story. It’s easy to forget that the cruel world outside the barn exists.
I myself was so keen on escaping through the “gold-spray-painted gate to Pandemonium” that for long stretches, and especially before these hints of serious physical harm were revealed, it didn’t occur to me that the teenagers’ distress might in fact be the product of neglect, troubled home lives, or what Clune suggests is an underlying transience to American culture. This is a testament to the novel’s powers of enchantment; it seduces you into thinking like a child again.
Yet Clune also makes a case for keeping one ear open to imaginative or quasi-religious modes long into adulthood. The data-driven explanations offered to Nick by the medical establishment, for example, can seem just as fantastic as the kids’ bespoke paganism. The conventional cures are laced with absurdism, when a cure is available at all: a psychiatrist explains it’s too late to pursue treatment; if only Nick had come to him earlier, he might have been able to prescribe a pill. An emergency room attendant offers Nick a high-tech solution for controlling his breathing: a paper bag. A hilarious appointment with a cognitive behavioral therapist backfires tremendously, leaving Nick more anxious than ever. “I’ve never seen it go that low before,” the therapist says in disbelief, watching Nick’s temperature plummet on a biofeedback monitor. Pan, by contrast, who by this point exists somewhere between a metaphor and an elaborate game of pretend, has greater therapeutic power. Of the origins of his anxiety, Nick reflects: “Maybe it’s better to pretend it could be Pan instead of Divorce, magic instead of mental illness.”
Up to a point. Back in the barn, Pan’s sublime powers begin to show their dark side, leading to macabre bacchanalia. After Ian’s rituals become increasingly insidious and disturbing—involving murdering drugged mice with a shovel and spying on Nick while he has sex with Sarah—Ty renounces his membership to what Nick has privately dubbed “The First Church of Pan.” “I thought it was just a game,” Ty says. “But I was just keeping two levels open,” allowing imagination to act as cover for an underlying cruelty: “I was helping to hide the level where shit was getting sicker.”
By the end of the novel, Nick seems to believe in two explanations for his panic at once: while “Divorce” seems to have triggered it, he still can’t rule out the idea that he’s been possessed by an ancient spirit. His father, convinced that life at Chariot Courts isn’t good for Nick, sends him to live with his mother again. The lingering sense of magic follows him there. The new house is large and expensive—qualities that, in a “spiritual sense,” ought to make it “heavy.” It is perched, however, right on a major highway, which to Nick renders it vulnerable to “armies of impermanence.” He is a mere flicker in the windshields of all who pass by: “The world of suburban adults didn’t offer a vocabulary for understanding the uncanny desolation of Mom’s house.” A kid like Nick requires private metaphors.
BY INHABITING NICK’S PANIC so intimately, Clune has achieved a remarkable sleight of genre, threading realism’s dull needle with a semi-magical thread. Nothing fantastic ever actually happens—this is, strictly speaking, psychological realism—and yet the novel gains access to a heightened plane hospitable to the paranormal. This leveling up of the story’s supernatural range aids its philosophical inquiry into the relationship between panic, consciousness, and art.
A major symptom of panic is that it heightens Nick’s ability to uncover hidden meaning in the world—one precursor to becoming an artist. At the onset of an attack, he finds himself “becoming prophetic, becoming retroprophetic, looking back over the past year and seeing patterns, seeing the patterns and listening to the words.” He draws connections in “the world of things” others would dismiss. When he finally tries to write down these impressions, he discovers that literature tames the panic induced by his proto-artistic “premonitions” by lending them form: “If the writing was strong enough, what remained after the purifying transcription would be Pan’s beautiful carapace. The god itself absent.” What started as a Bildungsroman has by this point become a Kunstlerroman. As in Clune’s memoirs, all that fumbling “outside reality like a child at a locked door,” all those extended struggles with panic and addiction, become an allegory for developing the preliterary imagination.
Nick’s discovery carries Kantian echoes reflected in Clune’s scholarly work. If panic is an “excess of consciousness”—a raw encounter with the Kantian and terror-inducing sublime—then the cure is to find an inviting shape or form in which to contain it. This definition of art reverberates throughout the book, with a line copped from one of Sarah’s poems serving as an oft-repeated refrain: “Beauty is a shape open to feeling.” “I like things with spaces inside them,” she elaborates, “like where you can go.” The young couple’s favorite song is “More Than a Feeling” (i.e., if it’s more than a feeling, it’s real), a song that they agree “has like literally got a door in the middle of it.” Of the playground he visited as a kid, Nick recalls, “The sandbox was a magical place.” Though the sand that had “migrated” outside the boundaries of the box was just more chaos and dirt, “within the frame, matter became meaningful.”
Having grown up in Indiana (where, like Nick, I attended Catholic high school), I was especially partial to the way Nick’s quasi-magical way of viewing the world re-enchants Real America—so often presented as the ultimate fire retardant to the eternal flame of Art—just as effectively as everything else. The effect is proof, as Nick reflects one night, of what good writing can do: “You wrote about the boredom and horror and emptiness of this world—all the Chariot Courts’ artificiality—but if you did it well enough,” it becomes possible to create not only “a level of the world invulnerable to panic,” but “a shape open to feeling.” The novel transforms the raw materials of my own flyover childhood—our Ruby Tuesdays, Ace Hardwares, and “broad fields,” our treeless horizons that do “nothing to stop the wind” or the roar of the interstate—into a genuine, if existentially disquieting, encounter with the sublime.
For a novel that seems to be riffing on Kant, it’s impressive that Pan is as funny and conversational as it is. Clune is alive to the unintended hilarity of suburban teenagedom, not to mention neurosis itself. Spiraling into anxiety, Nick observes: “Thinking about panic could turn into panic. I wasn’t even sure if thinking about panic was actually different from panic. A philosophical question.” Before Ty gets his license, he and Nick are dependent on cabs, tormenting the drivers with their poor cosplay of middle age: “Talking ’bout the Bulls!” Ty yells into one cabbie’s ear, in a botched attempt at adult conversation. (“Neither of us knew about the custom of giving tips to cab drivers,” Nick rejoins.) In an elaborate plan to buy alcohol, Tod sends Nick into a liquor store in a wheelchair, because “Who’s going to deny booze to someone in a wheelchair?” While Tod waits in the parking lot, Nick wrestles his way into the shop. “Thought your friend woulda helped you,” says the clerk, already suspicious. “He’s drunk,” Nick lies. “He thinks you can’t come into liquor stores if you’re already drunk. . . . He’s superstitious.” Clune’s prose is deadpan and deceptively casual, alt-lit adjacent in its plainspokenness (Pan arrives endorsed by Tao Lin), yet trip-wired with the idiosyncrasies that constitute a distinct style. In the throes of paranoid insomnia, Nick, teenage savant of the poetic overstatement, is horrified by well-rested people who dare to “place their necks on the altar of night.”
There are moments, however, when trying to parse Nick’s cryptic theories reminded me of my own first-time slog through Critique of Judgment—a task completed only with effort. Late in the novel, in what is billed as his greatest flash of insight yet, Nick imagines that a buzzing fly is in fact “the black tip of a brush, a paintbrush” tracing a “huge black tree with jagged branches” in the air, an image that is “about my ordinary reality seen from the perspective of a different kind of being. A being that sees time all at once.” He continues: “it was Pan’s thought, Pan’s perspective, Pan’s insight.”
Occasional instances of overexertion are more than compensated for by the magical atmosphere of opening, and by the central conceit that Nick is—religiously, artistically, and medically—possessed by the inspiration to exit his own head and enter another’s. (And this would indeed be the privileged perspective of a god: someone who can see everyone’s thoughts and “all of time” at once.) The value of the novel’s sturdier metaphors for the mysteries of individual consciousness is captured in an exchange between Nick and Sarah. They’re discussing the idea that Nick’s panic is caused by Pan, and how it helps Sarah understand how his panic feels:
“So a theory of panic,” I said slowly, “is a comparison . . .”
“That makes it possible to connect me to you,” she finished.
Isn’t this also what a good novel can do?
It helps to approach Pan as a novel-in-metaphors, not all of which will make it possible for every reader to “connect.” Nick is an artist of consciousness on a quest for forms—private metaphors and gods—to contain it. Those unconverted to the First Church of Pan will nevertheless detect a certain truth in his impulse to mitigate struggle by elevating it: “People will make a church out of any bad thing,” he learns. There are worse choices than art.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) and The Visitors (2022) as well as the story collection Ghost Pains (2024; both And Other Stories).