As noted recently in this space, 2014’s “Wolf in White Van” is almost certainly the only New York Times bestselling novel, and National Book Award nominee, to be set in Montclair. I summarized the plot for you — a young man runs a mail-order fantasy game while convalescing after a disfiguring accident — and the local mentions.

Many were local shops that a teen might have frequented in the novel’s 1980s-’90s timeframe. But were they fiction or fact?

I’ve pointed out already that Book Exchange, a used bookstore that is cited several times, was a real business, on Arrow Highway at Monte Vista Avenue.

Author John Darnielle, a North Carolina resident who is best known as the singer-songwriter behind the band The Mountain Goats, emailed after my column posted online, apologizing for overlooking my original query.

Golden Arcade, Starship Video and Cinema Video, all named in “Wolf,” were real places from his own youth in south Claremont, Darnielle said. “Wolf’s” narrator is a young man named Sean living on Montclair’s Monte Vista Avenue.

In “Wolf,” Sean describes Golden Arcade like this: “The arcade was next to a liquor store about six blocks up Monte Vista. It was called Golden Arcade and nobody ever went there … there was never anybody at Golden Arcade except the woman who worked there. She sat behind a counter listening to a small radio, reading a magazine, waiting for customers who never came.”

The arcade, Sean continues, was “a single rectangular room with games pushed back up against three of the walls and two air hockey tables in the middle.”

The real-life address was 4917 Moreno Ave. at Monte Vista, the downscale Vista Moreno Plaza.

In his email, Darnielle told me: “Golden Arcade did exist — it was … not far from Montclair Plaza, in a small (five or six storefronts) strip mall. It had air hockey tables and video games, but not really enough of them to make it a proper arcade; it had a pretty languid vibe.”

Reader Jeff Harlow chimed in about my “Wolf” column on Facebook: “Golden Arcade was on the southeast corner of Moreno and Monte Vista next to the liquor store as stated in this article. I lived in Montclair from ’72-88. My brother and our childhood friends spent a lot of time there playing Foosball and other original games such as Galaga, Donkey Kong and Asteroids to name a few.”

Now, Starship Video. It was at 1238 W. Foothill Blvd. in Upland at Mountain Avenue. It’s described this way in “Wolf”:

“The cool arcade was Starship over in Upland, next to Pic ‘n Save: it had an entrance built to look like a spaceship hatch, and blue track lighting all up and down the walkways inside. It had two levels and six walls, and you could get lost in there, or find things you’d missed every other time you’d gone in.”

I’m a little sorry I missed the arcade with an entrance built to look like a spaceship hatch.

“It was a surreal place,” my friend Allen Callaci told me, “an arcade situated in a pretty pedestrian strip mall between a Stater Bros. and a Pic ‘n Save that was like entering the Starship Enterprise. Another small detail of the place was this huge (for the time) big-screen TV which incomprehensibly seemed to be on an infinite loop of George Pal’s 1953 version of ‘The War of the Worlds’ and the video for Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Let’s Get Physical.’”

His brother, Dennis, another childhood devotee of the place, said: “The inside structure was built up so that you would walk down to the entryway to the main pit of the video games. Clean, black and white lines with some trappings of maybe a NASA space shuttle motif. Tron, Moon Patrol, the Journey video game and all the standbys … Weekend evenings were hectic down there, possible lines behind machines, with all walks in the building plunking down quarters to their jam.”

Darnielle had little to add to all that, but he sent me a link to an image on TokenCatalog.com of both sides of a Starship Video game token: a rocket on one side and — why not? — a clownface on the other.

As for Cinema Video, that was a video store, not a video arcade. Hence the redundant-sounding name: Cinema Video. The address was 750 S. Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont.

It’s in “Wolf” like this: “…I drove down to Cinema Video. I can hardly believe Cinema Video’s still in business, and I really can’t believe how many videotapes they still have in there, gathering dust against the east wall. But look down toward your feet and they’re all right there, neatly piled up in hopeful stacks on the floor. There’s a little sign taped to the wall at about knee level, green marker on canary-colored copier paper: Used Tapes $5.00.”

Darnielle commented by email: “Cinema Video was in Claremont in the ’90s, again in a corner strip mall just south of San Jose and Indian Hill. I probably would not have remembered their name if I hadn’t returned tapes late so often that I’d get messages on my answering machine: ‘Hi, this is Jerry from Cinema Video…’”

One reference in the novel that baffled me was a mosaic featuring Native Americans said to be inlaid in the plaza outside the Montclair Chamber of Commerce — although the narrator seemed to actually mean City Hall. Darnielle told me essentially that he made up the mosaic by conflating two or three murals, none of them in Montclair.

He wrote: “The mosaic is another Claremont-to-Montclair port and also a Pomona-to-Montclair one — it’s based on the side of the bank building at Indian Hill and Foothill,” referring to the former Pomona First Federal in Claremont, “and a similar mosaic at the Claremont School of Theology nearby, and something I saw possibly also at a PFF near the Pomona mall.” The latter would be the mural inside the bank, now the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

So, there’s your guide to local scenes in “Wolf in White Van.” I’m sure it’s the most unusual interview Darnielle gave in connection with his novel, with everyone else pondering the weighty themes and such.

I thank him for his indulgence and hope Jonathan Lethem is just as patient when his locally set novel “The Feral Detective” is released in a few weeks and I come calling with questions.

Darnielle signed off from his email, “all best to Montclair and everybody there.” Back at you, John.

David Allen, a wolf in a blue Fiat, writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.