“But suddenly I realized how strange and even terrible it is that a person looks out from inside their face. Realize is the wrong word. I felt the weirdness of it. Like my vision was standing with its feet in my face. Like my face is a diving board, I thought. Like when you’re about to jump from the high dive and you look and you can see the edge of the board dark against the blue … My nose dark against the sky like that.”

Michael Clune is a critic and author who has written a memoir about his heroin addiction, creative nonfiction about the transcendent properties of computer games, and an academic work on the value of aesthetic judgement. Pan (2025) is his first novel, and as one might expect from such an erudite and mercurial mind, it’s brilliant, baffling, and utterly bonkers. The novel is a coming of age story about a young man growing up in the U.S. suburbs who begins to suffer panic attacks, which leads him down a dangerous rabbit hole to the Great God Pan.  Clune’s book is a glorious, madcap celebration of outsider-ness, an ode to finding occult meaning in the mundane, and a frequently amusing exploration of the sheer alienness of being a teenager in suburban America. He mixes paranoia and revelation, literature and rock music, teenage angst and existential crisis with panache. Pan is a wonderful and disorienting novel that haunts the reader beyond the final pages.

Nicholas is kicked out by his Russian-born mother and goes to  lives in the Chicago suburbs with his father. At the age of fifteen, he suffers his first panic attack in geometry class. Unsatisfied with his medical diagnosis, Nicholas and his friend Sarah go looking for clues as to what’s really happening to him, and stumble across the link between panic and the Greek god Pan. Together, they trace the manifestations of the god across unexpected emergences in music, art and literature – the open space in the chorus of Boston’s anthemic ‘More Than A Feeling’, the grisly revelation at the end of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, the bold colours of Italian Renaissance painter Bellini. Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and Sarah soon find themselves drawn to the Barn, a haven of drugs, alcohol and music inhabited by the coolest kid in their class Tod, and his damaged older brother Ian. Soon, Ian is leading a church of Pan, replete with arcane rituals, while Nicholas struggles to keep his consciousness from falling out of his head. Is it possible to play host to Pan and emerge unscathed?

Pan is told through Nicholas’ narrative voice, which is a marvellous creation. Clune does a wonderful job of capturing the restless energy of adolescence. But Nicholas is also neurodivergent, and the novel expertly captures that feeling of slowly realizing that most people think quite differently from how you do. Nicholas’ head is always buzzing full of ideas, and Clune is able to convey both his brilliance and his eccentricity. As with many coming of age tales, Nicholas has to deal with falling in and out of love, early sexual encounters, navigating the minefield that is social status in high school. But he also has to learn how to manage the symptoms of his mental condition, in the context of the working class suburbs of America in the pre-internet days. Though there is still very much stigma attached to being neurodivergent, it’s easy to forget how little understanding or context there was for any kind of mental conditions in the recent past. Nicholas is given very little support from the doctors or psychiatrists, and is basically left to work out his own coping mechanisms by himself, while he, his friends and his family are given no information or context with which to help or support him. 

Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that Nicholas turns to Pan, and the occult more generally, as a way of understanding his condition. Although it is never mentioned in the text, Arthur Machen’s great story The Great God Pan (1894) was never far from my mind while I was reading this book. Machen’s novella is a key work of the early Weird, in which seeing the Great God Pan is a terrible revelation that violently strips back the veil of this reality to reveal the truth that hides underneath. Nicholas is undergoing something very similar. Adolescence is, after all, a time of revelations. The novelty of much of what one is feeling as one gains new understandings about the world and one’s place in it leads to an intensity of feeling that can feel like an encounter with the sublime. This is what Clune manages to convey so well in his book, that feeling of breaking out of the stifling restrictions of one’s life, whether by sex, drugs, or alcohol, which at the time makes you feel like you’re the first person to ever discover these things. The hidden profundities waiting to be discovered in every new song you hear, the shock of recognition when you read an older work of fiction and find something in it that resonates so strongly with your own lived experience you believe it can’t be a coincidence. In many ways, adolescence is a temporary madness, but perhaps it’s easier for those of us locked outside the consensus experience of being teenage as described by so many books and films by our neurodiversity to properly appreciate that.

Clune’s prose is ecstatic, the only way to approach his subject matter with any authority. I found myself wanting to share multiple sections with friends, simply because of how much I enjoyed their humour, their weirdness, their pathos. His character work is also fantastic. Nicholas is such a fully realized individual that it doesn’t matter that his own teenage myopia stops him from conveying us the interiority of his friends or family. His friendship with Ty, shaped around humour and a shared but profoundly different experience of being outsiders due to Ty’s race, is beautifully drawn, and leads to some genuinely tender moments. And if Sarah and Nicholas are never going to really understand each other as people, such is the fate of many teenage sweethearts. Pan is an absolute triumph of Weird and outsider literature, and it makes me genuinely excited to see what Clune has in store for us next.

Pan is due for release 24th July – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org