Michael Clune’s debut novel, Pan, is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1990s. The central theme announces itself early on, when the narrator, a fifteen-year-old Chicagoan named Nicholas, ruminates on what is cool: 

Cool is the relative absence of consciousness. Which is why not caring is cool. The coolest eyes are dead eyes. Sunglasses are perennially cool. I believe that sunglasses have a different origin than other forms of eyewear … Sunglasses are descended directly from the opaque visors
of knights. 

It is not coolness which preoccupies Pan, however, but rather its opposite: self-consciousness. At the start of the novel, Nicholas goes to live with his divorced dad in a barren suburban neighbourhood with the grand name Chariot Courts. He is obsessed with the medieval heroics depicted in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (he believes knights are the epitome of cool). More than anything, though, he is obsessed with the workings of his own restless mind. He has a strong reaction to certain words, sounds, colours and patterns, and an intense identification with inanimate objects, which leads to recurring panic attacks and the sensation that his consciousness exists outside his body and can ‘go into things’. Nicholas claims that he has supernatural powers. For example, he believes that he can ‘end’ winter because ‘the seasons start inside you’ and ‘the things around start to mimic you’. But it seems just as plausible that he happened to notice the first breeze and onset of spring.

However, Nicholas soon finds validation for his way of thinking. He is invited home by his classmate Sarah and she shows him her older brother’s record collection. It turns out they share an enthusiasm for the rock band Boston, particularly their greatest hit, ‘More Than a Feeling’. During what may