Pan - by Michael Clune (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. It's the '90s, and he's been living with his dad in the Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. One day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the pagan god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend Sarah hunt for answers why-in Oscar Wilde and in Baudelaire, in rock 'n roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where Todd's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Funny, provocative, and cerebral, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael W. Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out, "one of the year's best books" (The New Yorker), earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could, in fact, be aanything"--

Book Synopsis

Nominated for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize - A Washington Post Notable Book - Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME and Slate

"Pan is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy--and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror--from end to end." --Matthew Spektor, The Washington Post

"Deliciously observed, ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs." --Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in
this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: he's been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt
for answers why--in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod's charismatic older brother, Ian, leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out--named one of The New Yorker's best books of the year--earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

Review Quotes

"Every other sentence in this brilliant novel has a door in it, one that can take you to a whole new world, which is really this world, transfigured." --Laura Miller, Slate (10 Best Books of 2025)

"Pan, the astonishing and disorienting debut novel by critic and memoirist Michael Clune, immerses us in the mind of an adolescent neurotic." --Commonweal Magazine

"A steady oscillation between deliciously observed, ferociously strange fragments of consciousness and the social kabuki of the tragicomic teenage bildungsroman. . . . Clune has so elegantly set up a narrative playground where we can reasonably believe Nicholas is stumbling into Bach, Baudelaire, Camus and Wilde. Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . When we're really in Nicholas's mind, we never want to leave . . . The juice here is watching Clune's little cyclones of thought, vortical whooshes around art, drugs, sex and analysis . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs . . . I could have read 300 pages of just this--Nicholas looking out the window and describing what he saw--and felt that I'd gotten my money's worth." --Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review

"Pan is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit, the sort of holy mania one finds in writers like William Blake or Christopher Smart. . . . At once startlingly funny and radiantly . . . strange. . . . Charged with so much fearsome grandeur that even the book's micro-movements feel operatic. . . . Approachable and inviting but also wild enough to seem practically avant-garde. . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy--and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror--from end to end." --Matthew Spektor, The Washington Post

"[Pan] keenly describes the symptoms--and more important, the existential stakes--of extreme anxiety . . . Clune has turned his cockeyed sensibility and coruscating intellect to fiction . . . Nicholas's narration captures the subjective experience of panic with high-res precision . . . The overall effect is like Judy Blume filtered through David Lynch or William S. Burroughs: Are You There, God? It's Me, Nicholas, Having a Panic Attack While My Friends Trip on Acid . . . Perhaps psychologists and philosophers should prescribe this dazzling and disorienting novel as exposure therapy for both the sick and the well." --Scott Stossel, The Atlantic

"Nick is a beguiling addition to the literary lineage of child mystics that descends from the stories of J.D. Salinger . . . [Pan] ought to be a breakout for Mr. Clune, who captures Nick's strobing visions with remarkable lucidity and excellent dry humor. . . . The child-mystic novel argues that maturation dulls us to elemental and overwhelming wonders. Pan is a reawakening." --The Wall Street Journal

"A stunning debut . . . Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence . . . Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows . . . when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world." --The Guardian

"Clune is a very good writer. He seems to have access to another realm of the mind." --The New Yorker

"Clune's luminous debut novel captures the angst of growing up in suburban America . . . What sets it apart is Clune's luminous prose, deadpan humor and ability to make his narrator's panic attacks, drug-taking and philosophising ('Where do thoughts come from?' he wonders) so enthralling that his story is a revelation and never a retread . . . Pan is a strange and original novel that is grounded in the way Clune consistently does the most vital thing--make the world new." --Financial Times

"Clune doesn't choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic, explanations of Nick's experience. When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune's perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism." --The Boston Globe

"The defamiliarisation Clune employs when Nick describes his attacks is a variation on the blunt lyricism that won him acclaim for his memoir White Out . . . A tricky if not quite delicate balancing act." --Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books

"Clune's debut novel dances on a knife's edge between the heavenly and the hellish . . . One of the best contemporary novels to evoke the paradoxes of the faith . . . Imagine a 15-year-old Baudelaire trying to find his way in Chicago." --The Bulwark

"Sometimes the plunge into the unknown is so deep that you get lost, but that's not such a bad thing. You just have to close your eyes and trust--and it's easy to put your faith in Clune . . . Pan balances the wildly imaginative nature of childhood with the wisdom of adulthood . . . I find immense comfort in the fact that I'm alive at the same time as the publication of Pan." --Hobart Pulp

"One of those rare, enduring finds . . . Pan is the literary equivalent of a benevolent acid trip, leaving all your mental furniture rearranged. . . . It seduces you into thinking like a child again. . . . 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 . . . 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." --Jessi Jezewska Stevens, BookForum

"A metaphysical horror story cloaked in the guise of a Künstlerroman, Pan is ultimately about the nature of subjectivity and the loneliness of living in the fortress of one's own, unruly mind . . . [Passages] glimpse at Augustine's splendor . . . [Clune] makes the unruly mind of a teenager the stuff of high art . . . Pan pries Nick's skull open. Beware of what's inside." --Adam Wilson, The Nation

"Nick's earnest attempts to make sense of his feelings amid the unrewarding Illinois exurbs give the novel its coiled, ruminative energy . . . [Clune gives] a long look at the parallels and the inseparability of Pan from panic, epiphany from apophenia, our brightly intangible inner worlds from the asphalt and cinderblocks, the mice and weeds, that we have to share. For that alone, Pan deserves to feel seen." --Stephanie Burt, The Baffler

"Stylish, strange, and spellbinding, Michael Clune's novel tells the story of a teenage boy who suffers his first panic attack and is sent down a dark rabbit hole of rock music, literature, and self-discovery--or discovery of a self that might just be part Greek god. Clune's book is full of unexpected, odd turns, but is told with such skill that the reader--like the story's hero himself--is willing to forget what he knows and go along on a wild ride." --Town & Country

"Stunning . . . [A] wild ride of a debut novel. . . . Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. . . . Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows . . . When we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world." --The Observer (UK)

"Clune is offering an original and strikingly contemporary metaphysics. There has been much talk recently of an end to the century of autofiction, and much corresponding demand for new literary forms that perhaps resurrect or mix-and-match elements of past traditions but also create something new for the present. That it's been done by a high-school-stoner novel riffing on Ancient Greece is hilarious and surprising, but perfect." --Compact

"Pan is hypnotic, eerie, and surprisingly affecting." --Our Culture

"Michael Clune's psychological fiction Pan . . . has literary circles buzzing . . . Rendered in dazzling prose, Clune's debut novel paints a luminous portrait of the unique psychosis that growing up in suburbia can foster." --Bustle (Best New Books Summer 2025)

"With prose as strange as it is hypnotizing, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more." --Harper's Bazaar

"A job of literature is to tackle existential anxieties, and Michael Clune's new novel PAN does exactly that . . . Clune's brilliance isn't in the obscure connections he draws, but in his uncanny ability to remind us how human we all are." --BookPage

"Funny and unconventional . . . a book one might do well to steal language and ideas from . . . Clune's language . . . is undeniably lovely and his ideas worth lingering over." --Oxford Review of Books

"Evocative and erudite . . . The narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Pan] explodes the central dilemma of the panic attack--what is real? and then, whether real or illusory, on what plane can I approach?--and wraps it all up in a moving coming-of-age story." --Literary Hub

"Intriguingly complex . . . A sly and artful bildungsroman." --Kirkus

"Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him." --Maggie Nelson, New York Times bestselling author of The Argonauts, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"A strange, vivid, and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood." --Tao Lin, author of Taipei, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." --Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School; author of 10:04, one of the New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century

"Brilliant . . . A mind-bending, psychologically bending, really thrilling, interesting book." --Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies

"A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration." --Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting

"No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there's nothing left but changeling magic. I didn't want the book to end, and I'm still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare." --Blake Butler, author of Molly

"This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia, and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages." --Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

About the Author

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently a professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University and lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.