This year, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle is releasing a novel. It's called Wolf in White Van, and it's out September 30 via Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The cover, above, was designed by Rodrigo Corral. Sean McDonald, the executive editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, describes the book, writing:

There are many things worth singling out for praise in *Wolf in White Van:*the unforgettable main character, Sean Phillips, who has been isolated by a disfiguring injury since age seventeen; Trace Italian, the intricate game within the novel that Sean created and runs; the interplay of real and imagined worlds, which is both complex and heartbreaking; the structure of the storytelling—audacious, brilliant, and never anything but convincing and unreasonably suspenseful; the prose itself, which is precise and beautiful and (forgive me) lyrical. But the greatest and perhaps most unexpected satisfaction is the quality that encompasses all these things, that this is simply a magnificent novel, weird and dark and wonderful, adventurous and spellbinding in the way of any great piece of literary art.

Read our "Situation Critical" interview with Darnielle, and watch him perform "Harlem Roulette" for Pitchfork.tv: