A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this debut novel. 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.
Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a coming-of-age 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.