It’s for Dorks

There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future ... is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama. Nicholas, the book’s narrator, is that sort of kid. He goes on to talk about a four-year-old girl found dead of exposure in a Chicago housing project, whom he learned about through a friend’s stepfather, a police officer also in possession of photographs of the interior of Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment (‘pictures the newspapers never got’). It’s the 1990s, the heyday of US serial killers, before they passed the mantle to mass shooters. When it comes to class, things are in flux: ‘They shut that housing project down, farmed the residents out into town houses.’ Nick lives in such a town house with his father, having been kicked out of his mother’s place not long after the couple’s divorce for being ‘out of control’. Chariot Courts, where he now lives, is not ‘the worst in terms of low-grade housing’, but it’s nonetheless a ‘battleground between the idea of home and the armies of impermanence’. We aren’t in the suburban idyll of the 1950s but a zone of displacement, scarcity and desolation during America’s last boom decade.