What do you think?
Rate this book
Pan
“I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School
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.
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.
Paperback
First published July 22, 2025
333 people are currently reading
13340 people want to read
About the author
Michael W. Clune
8 books41 followersMichael 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 the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Also writes as Michael Clune .
Also writes as Michael Clune .
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 299 reviews
August 13, 2025
if you're buying this book, buy another one to stack on top cos he stares
April 30, 2025
This book is absolutely brilliant. It is unique and strange, funny and dark, beautiful and brash, and I’m sure it won’t be leaving my mind for a very long time, if ever.
Pan sends us on a spiralling journey through the mind of Nick, a fifteen year old boy bewildered by his own consciousness. After his mother sends him off to live with his father, Nick experiences his first panic attacks: moments of horrible awareness that while his body is a thing, there is something inside of it that is not, and it wants out. Desperate for answers, Nick and his almost-girlfriend Sarah sift through art, music and literature for insight, finally ending up at “The Barn” with a group of fellow outcasts, led by the charismatic, college-aged Ian, who claims to have all the answers Nick needs: but Ian’s theories lead down a rabbit hole that grows more and more sinister and unhinged…
Pan is a totally unique novel that dissects the mystery of human interiority with humor, sharp observation, and philosophical might; it is ambitious and amorphous and funnels so deeply into the human psyche that thoughts are sliced open to their wordless, vibrating cores. What parts of our minds can never be truly shared, fully explained, or understood? Even— especially— by ourselves? What warped beauty and terror is opened to us when we make “a church of mental illness?”
I feel so privileged to have been able to read this ARC and eagerly await the July publication date to celebrate. :)
Pan sends us on a spiralling journey through the mind of Nick, a fifteen year old boy bewildered by his own consciousness. After his mother sends him off to live with his father, Nick experiences his first panic attacks: moments of horrible awareness that while his body is a thing, there is something inside of it that is not, and it wants out. Desperate for answers, Nick and his almost-girlfriend Sarah sift through art, music and literature for insight, finally ending up at “The Barn” with a group of fellow outcasts, led by the charismatic, college-aged Ian, who claims to have all the answers Nick needs: but Ian’s theories lead down a rabbit hole that grows more and more sinister and unhinged…
Pan is a totally unique novel that dissects the mystery of human interiority with humor, sharp observation, and philosophical might; it is ambitious and amorphous and funnels so deeply into the human psyche that thoughts are sliced open to their wordless, vibrating cores. What parts of our minds can never be truly shared, fully explained, or understood? Even— especially— by ourselves? What warped beauty and terror is opened to us when we make “a church of mental illness?”
I feel so privileged to have been able to read this ARC and eagerly await the July publication date to celebrate. :)
July 31, 2025
The cover! THE COVER!!! Delicious. But the book… oh boy… It’s such a great concept exploring a teenage boy’s mental health and bristling adolescence. He keeps having panic attacks and then becomes convinced that he has the Greek God Pan inside his head. So yeah, great, into it.
It’s just that this really is all that happens. A series of panic attacks over and over. The details get hazy. The writing is beautiful but unbalanced, often focusing on the details of his psychosis before kind of skimming over an important plot point.
I really feel like there’s a great book here somewhere under the surface but it all got washed out. Or maybe I was just blindsided by the glorious cover?!
It’s just that this really is all that happens. A series of panic attacks over and over. The details get hazy. The writing is beautiful but unbalanced, often focusing on the details of his psychosis before kind of skimming over an important plot point.
I really feel like there’s a great book here somewhere under the surface but it all got washed out. Or maybe I was just blindsided by the glorious cover?!
February 17, 2025
Reading this book is the closest I’ve come to being hypnotized. And at the same time, it made me want to dance. This feeling, I came to realize, arose from the rhythm found within the pages. The palpability of a novel’s rhythm is an extraordinary feat on the part of a writer. It guided this novel, from sentence to sentence and beginning to end. Things like light, color, breath, and insects provided the beat of the story.
In Pan, the edges of consciousness blur and the mind teeters on a fulcrum. Mental illness becomes God-like prophecy and turns back around again. Themes of philosophy and adolescence are served on a metaphysical platter. Even visits to Ace Hardware and math class can feel like an existential trip in this mind-boggling novel.
Like the protagonist, Nick, I saw the shadow of my thoughts on the pages before me. Not out of a panic, as in his case, but because the electricity of Clune’s prose beckoned me forth like nothing before. This has earned a permanent space on my bookshelf, only to be removed when I desire a re-read (and I am certain I will).
In Pan, the edges of consciousness blur and the mind teeters on a fulcrum. Mental illness becomes God-like prophecy and turns back around again. Themes of philosophy and adolescence are served on a metaphysical platter. Even visits to Ace Hardware and math class can feel like an existential trip in this mind-boggling novel.
Like the protagonist, Nick, I saw the shadow of my thoughts on the pages before me. Not out of a panic, as in his case, but because the electricity of Clune’s prose beckoned me forth like nothing before. This has earned a permanent space on my bookshelf, only to be removed when I desire a re-read (and I am certain I will).
August 24, 2025
there’s a fairly common thought experiment people have while smoking pot that makes some wonder ‘What if what I see as blue isn’t what you see as blue?’
Imagine someone you know has that thought and won’t shut the fuck up about it.
that kind of thinking is what this book felt like for 300+ pages.
Imagine someone you know has that thought and won’t shut the fuck up about it.
that kind of thinking is what this book felt like for 300+ pages.
June 26, 2025
In this autofictional mood piece, acclaimed memoirist Michael Clune takes us into the crumbling consciousness of fifteen-year-old Nick as he tries and fails to understand, ascribe, and overcome his struggles with a debilitating panic disorder. An outsider both at home and school, stifled by the bleakness of his complicated family life and suburban upbringing and bursting at the seams – falling out of his face – from anxiety, he reaches for answers beyond his formal diagnosis and soon begins to suspect his real problem may be far from psychiatric: it must be that the Greek god Pan is trapped within his body.
Pan brilliantly captures the inherent precociousness of adolescence, the almost absurd need to locate meaning in the most fleeting details, so that everything is connected, every thought a revelation – the constant coming-to and the bigness of it all. The writing is terrifyingly good: simultaneously measured and grandiose, each sentence skilfully warping itself to the exact shape and experience of panic attacks. But this isn't all that makes the book so unsettling. While Nick is obviously consumed by a need to rid himself of Pan, really his story explores how deep our peers can borrow into our heads, and to what sinister ends.
What begins as a private if also embarassing affliction begins taking over when our protagonist falls in with a drug-fueled coterie of misfits who not only enable his descent into magical thinking but also celebrate it. As Nick comes of age – as he discovers drugs, sex, and the confusing, all-important pressures of teenage society – he becomes increasingly untethered from reality, his narrative plunging readers into a slippery, amorphous fever dream. In this, the book seeks to interrogate the wordless, elusive core of our interiority, seemingly pushing us to think about what it is that we open ourselves to – what beauty, and what uncertain terror – when we, like Nick, make a church of our mental illness.
While I liked the prose and how it transported me to the feeling of being fifteen, I can't help but point to a degree of self-indulgence that kept me from fully entering the more conceptual bits of the story. The relative thinness of the secondary characters, the overly studied blankness, and the slightly pained references to art, literature and philosophy put me in the mind of The Secret History (and indeed I suspect Clune will attract an audience and a degree of adulation comparable to Donna Tartt's). There's some astonishing things here, but on the whole the book seemed to demand my attention more than it commanded it.
Pan brilliantly captures the inherent precociousness of adolescence, the almost absurd need to locate meaning in the most fleeting details, so that everything is connected, every thought a revelation – the constant coming-to and the bigness of it all. The writing is terrifyingly good: simultaneously measured and grandiose, each sentence skilfully warping itself to the exact shape and experience of panic attacks. But this isn't all that makes the book so unsettling. While Nick is obviously consumed by a need to rid himself of Pan, really his story explores how deep our peers can borrow into our heads, and to what sinister ends.
What begins as a private if also embarassing affliction begins taking over when our protagonist falls in with a drug-fueled coterie of misfits who not only enable his descent into magical thinking but also celebrate it. As Nick comes of age – as he discovers drugs, sex, and the confusing, all-important pressures of teenage society – he becomes increasingly untethered from reality, his narrative plunging readers into a slippery, amorphous fever dream. In this, the book seeks to interrogate the wordless, elusive core of our interiority, seemingly pushing us to think about what it is that we open ourselves to – what beauty, and what uncertain terror – when we, like Nick, make a church of our mental illness.
While I liked the prose and how it transported me to the feeling of being fifteen, I can't help but point to a degree of self-indulgence that kept me from fully entering the more conceptual bits of the story. The relative thinness of the secondary characters, the overly studied blankness, and the slightly pained references to art, literature and philosophy put me in the mind of The Secret History (and indeed I suspect Clune will attract an audience and a degree of adulation comparable to Donna Tartt's). There's some astonishing things here, but on the whole the book seemed to demand my attention more than it commanded it.
October 5, 2025
120 irritating pages in, and I just can't anymore. Teens doing drugs, blah blah blah, paragraphs packed with gibberish, blah blah blah. Get me the hell outta here, I beg of thee.
Ugh...
1 Exasperated Star
Ugh...
1 Exasperated Star
September 9, 2025
Holy mismarketing... Like egregious mismarketing that I think does a disservice to the author and to the should-be target audience—TEEN BOYS! This book is YA through and through and could/should be the elusive much-sought after book for teen boys. Like why all the whining about "there are no books for teen boys" and when there is one, it's marketed as lit fic to a grown woman (me!).
Guess what, I, a grown woman, hated this book. I don't think it was bad, but man was it a book about a teen boy doing very teen boy things. This could be life changing in the hands of the right teen boy. For me, a grown woman who could not AVOID seeing reviews for this book, could not avoid seeing this hideous cover on every social media post for the entire month of July, this book had nothing for me. I bit due to the hype and due to the description talking about Greek mythology and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (fyi, you won't find deep meditations on these things lol). But what I got was teens doing LSD and smoking weed and being fake deep while hanging out in a barn hallucinating and saying things like "where do thoughts come from, maaaan?" *exhales weed smoke cloud*
There are other things going on, like a great inner-dialogue about what it's like to have anxiety and even psychosis which I think would be VERY HELPFUL for teen boys dealing with similar mental health issues. It even reminded me of The Perks of Being a Wallflower or It's Kind of a Funny Story but more 70s hippie scene drug-coded, which is very much not something I enjoy. BUT I highly recommend this if you are a teen boy and I seriously hope this book eventually finds its way to the right section of the bookstore (YA) and becomes a major hit.
Guess what, I, a grown woman, hated this book. I don't think it was bad, but man was it a book about a teen boy doing very teen boy things. This could be life changing in the hands of the right teen boy. For me, a grown woman who could not AVOID seeing reviews for this book, could not avoid seeing this hideous cover on every social media post for the entire month of July, this book had nothing for me. I bit due to the hype and due to the description talking about Greek mythology and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (fyi, you won't find deep meditations on these things lol). But what I got was teens doing LSD and smoking weed and being fake deep while hanging out in a barn hallucinating and saying things like "where do thoughts come from, maaaan?" *exhales weed smoke cloud*
There are other things going on, like a great inner-dialogue about what it's like to have anxiety and even psychosis which I think would be VERY HELPFUL for teen boys dealing with similar mental health issues. It even reminded me of The Perks of Being a Wallflower or It's Kind of a Funny Story but more 70s hippie scene drug-coded, which is very much not something I enjoy. BUT I highly recommend this if you are a teen boy and I seriously hope this book eventually finds its way to the right section of the bookstore (YA) and becomes a major hit.
September 1, 2025
I have no idea what this was about or what happened but the cover is stunning.
July 15, 2025
PAN
Thank you to Penguin Press for this ARC for review.
The review:
Teenager tries to figure out why he’s having panic attacks. Thinks it might be because the Greek god Pan is trapped in his body. Is he trying to get out? aaah. Panic!! Really, nothing happens in this book, but it’s not one of those lovely “nothing happens” books either. It’s just that… nothing really happens.
Regarding this novel’s prose, dialogue, character work, (over)use of extended metaphor (FREQUENTLY), conversation among “outcasts,” exploration of culture and drugs and music—aside from a few little random sequences of half-funny half-creepy diatribe/monologues, everything falls flat. Fwap. Thump. Womp. It’s mostly like it wants to be eerie, cerebral and creepy, meditating on this precipice of a vast, gaping ancient and unknowable void, but it really just comes across as goofy and corny.
I appreciated the description of panic attacks early on the most—very vivid and accurate. The rest of the novel springs from this smart idea—a very good one—but the novel didn’t pull off what it needed to from it to make it work.
don’t judge a book by its cover goes both ways?
Is this a pan of pan?
🤷🏻♂️
Thank you to Penguin Press for this ARC for review.
The review:
Teenager tries to figure out why he’s having panic attacks. Thinks it might be because the Greek god Pan is trapped in his body. Is he trying to get out? aaah. Panic!! Really, nothing happens in this book, but it’s not one of those lovely “nothing happens” books either. It’s just that… nothing really happens.
Regarding this novel’s prose, dialogue, character work, (over)use of extended metaphor (FREQUENTLY), conversation among “outcasts,” exploration of culture and drugs and music—aside from a few little random sequences of half-funny half-creepy diatribe/monologues, everything falls flat. Fwap. Thump. Womp. It’s mostly like it wants to be eerie, cerebral and creepy, meditating on this precipice of a vast, gaping ancient and unknowable void, but it really just comes across as goofy and corny.
I appreciated the description of panic attacks early on the most—very vivid and accurate. The rest of the novel springs from this smart idea—a very good one—but the novel didn’t pull off what it needed to from it to make it work.
don’t judge a book by its cover goes both ways?
Is this a pan of pan?
🤷🏻♂️
November 2, 2025
A teenaged boy struggling with panic attacks believes the Greek god Pan is stuck in his head.
Then he starts hanging out with a group of people who are constantly high and causes him to spiral further.
This starts incredibly. The writing was evocative and intimate. I have never experienced a panic attack, but have witnessed one and had friends describe it to me. You can tell the book is autofiction as the author used the exact words to evoke the same clawing, claustrophobic feeling.
Panic, on the other hand, is excess of consciousness. Your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind en-tirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone. When you're cool you feel a kind of identification with inanimate objects. When you're in a state of panic you feel completely alienated from the object world. Panic shakes the thing that you are in horror. Panic belongs to the air.
The character constantly wonders: what am I even panicking about?
That hit me.
The first half feels grounded despite it feeling directionless. The second half descends into a fever dream of pointlessness and circles.
The author clearly has an amazing grasp of language with the masterful use of metaphors and interior imagery. However, the lacking plot and development of the characters hampered my rating.
The side characters never felt fully realised despite their interesting surface-level quirks and the ending didn’t wrap up anything.
Overall, incredible potential and start, but lacklustre execution.
Arc gifted by Penguin Vintage Books.
Bookstagram
Tiktok
Then he starts hanging out with a group of people who are constantly high and causes him to spiral further.
This starts incredibly. The writing was evocative and intimate. I have never experienced a panic attack, but have witnessed one and had friends describe it to me. You can tell the book is autofiction as the author used the exact words to evoke the same clawing, claustrophobic feeling.
Panic, on the other hand, is excess of consciousness. Your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind en-tirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone. When you're cool you feel a kind of identification with inanimate objects. When you're in a state of panic you feel completely alienated from the object world. Panic shakes the thing that you are in horror. Panic belongs to the air.
The character constantly wonders: what am I even panicking about?
That hit me.
The first half feels grounded despite it feeling directionless. The second half descends into a fever dream of pointlessness and circles.
The author clearly has an amazing grasp of language with the masterful use of metaphors and interior imagery. However, the lacking plot and development of the characters hampered my rating.
The side characters never felt fully realised despite their interesting surface-level quirks and the ending didn’t wrap up anything.
Overall, incredible potential and start, but lacklustre execution.
Arc gifted by Penguin Vintage Books.
Bookstagram
Tiktok
June 20, 2025
Anyone who’s ever dealt with panic attacks or generalized anxiety disorder will be haunted by this bizarre and clever story. The way panic is portrayed is painfully accurate; the spiraling thoughts, the hypersensitivity, the insomnia, the way reality begins to warp. At first, it’s disturbingly relatable.
And then?
We slip into fever dream territory.
We follow Nick, a 15-year-old who becomes aware of his own consciousness and immediately begins to spiral. As his panic deepens, his world becomes surreal and fractured. His anxiety isn’t just a condition, it becomes everything. Eventually, it becomes Pan.
Yes. Pan. The literal god. Or maybe not. That’s part of the fun. Or the nightmare.
As the story unravels, Nick joins a group of drug-fueled misfits who don’t just enable his descent; they celebrate it. By the end, we’re in full Midsommar mode: euphoric delusion, sun-drenched terror, and divine madness.
The prose is pure stream of consciousness. Nothing outside of Nick—other characters, the setting, even reality itself—feels concrete or reliable. It’s like being trapped inside a brain cracking open under pressure. Every page pulses with dread, disorientation, and a creeping sense that the world is melting from the inside out.
Rather than scratching an itch, Pan caused me an itch.
I’m not sure if I had an awakening or if my brain just hurts.
Either way: worth it.
This book is not a binge read. It costs you mental energy, but it rewards you with gleeful confusion. You finish it with your heart racing and a vague urge to lie down in the grass and stare at the sun.
Recommended for:
• Anxiety sufferers (who want to feel seen—or spooked)
• Mental health fiction fans
• Stream-of-consciousness weirdos
• People who liked I’m Thinking of Ending Things or Midsommar
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
And then?
We slip into fever dream territory.
We follow Nick, a 15-year-old who becomes aware of his own consciousness and immediately begins to spiral. As his panic deepens, his world becomes surreal and fractured. His anxiety isn’t just a condition, it becomes everything. Eventually, it becomes Pan.
Yes. Pan. The literal god. Or maybe not. That’s part of the fun. Or the nightmare.
As the story unravels, Nick joins a group of drug-fueled misfits who don’t just enable his descent; they celebrate it. By the end, we’re in full Midsommar mode: euphoric delusion, sun-drenched terror, and divine madness.
The prose is pure stream of consciousness. Nothing outside of Nick—other characters, the setting, even reality itself—feels concrete or reliable. It’s like being trapped inside a brain cracking open under pressure. Every page pulses with dread, disorientation, and a creeping sense that the world is melting from the inside out.
Rather than scratching an itch, Pan caused me an itch.
I’m not sure if I had an awakening or if my brain just hurts.
Either way: worth it.
This book is not a binge read. It costs you mental energy, but it rewards you with gleeful confusion. You finish it with your heart racing and a vague urge to lie down in the grass and stare at the sun.
Recommended for:
• Anxiety sufferers (who want to feel seen—or spooked)
• Mental health fiction fans
• Stream-of-consciousness weirdos
• People who liked I’m Thinking of Ending Things or Midsommar
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
July 31, 2025
I read the entire first half of Pan in one sitting. It was back in May and I only put it down because I was reading with friends and waiting for them to catch up. In Pan by Michael Clune we follow the story of Nick, a 15 year old boy who is very anxious and has anxiety disorder, although he’s not so sure. Nick and his friends are convinced the god Pan is trapped inside of him. This is a very interesting concept but the story goes in a bit of a different direction.
The first half was compulsively readable, I found Clune’s descriptions of panic and anxiety to be very accurate, I don’t think I’ve seen the experience described that way. The book is filled with humor, sometimes our mind focuses on the absurd to get us through, in Nick’s case, it’s reading the entirety of Ivanhoe in the middle of the night to quell his anxiety.
Parts 2 and 3 take a bit of a turn, and the story more focuses on Nick’s coming of age with his girlfriend Sarah and a bunch of misfits lead by college aged Ian. They spend their time at The Barn doing drugs and having philosophical discussions which become increasingly unhinged as the story progresses. Ian and the misfits feed into Nick’s delusion forming a “church of mental illness”.
In some ways this is like the burnout version of The Secret History but without the high stakes. I enjoyed my time with Pan I just wish it fully went there. It stayed more rooted in reality but I kept expecting (and hoping for) a turn to the macabre. Regardless this is a cerebral book meant to be read with friends or a book club, there’s much to discuss and panic about.
The first half was compulsively readable, I found Clune’s descriptions of panic and anxiety to be very accurate, I don’t think I’ve seen the experience described that way. The book is filled with humor, sometimes our mind focuses on the absurd to get us through, in Nick’s case, it’s reading the entirety of Ivanhoe in the middle of the night to quell his anxiety.
Parts 2 and 3 take a bit of a turn, and the story more focuses on Nick’s coming of age with his girlfriend Sarah and a bunch of misfits lead by college aged Ian. They spend their time at The Barn doing drugs and having philosophical discussions which become increasingly unhinged as the story progresses. Ian and the misfits feed into Nick’s delusion forming a “church of mental illness”.
In some ways this is like the burnout version of The Secret History but without the high stakes. I enjoyed my time with Pan I just wish it fully went there. It stayed more rooted in reality but I kept expecting (and hoping for) a turn to the macabre. Regardless this is a cerebral book meant to be read with friends or a book club, there’s much to discuss and panic about.
April 13, 2025
every second the book isn't talking, your thoughts are talking, urgently telling you about this heart attack you're either having or about to have.michael clune's debut novel (after his memoirs white out and gamelife), pan is a coming-of-age tale about a precocious kid and his generalized anxiety disorder. sex, drugs, panic attacks, separated parents, and the typical trials and tribulations of high school life overswarm poor young nick, whose just trying to make sense of himself and the world. funny, dark, weird, pan surprises and impresses, ably capturing the confused terror of teenagehood.
and then one day you realize the truth. that no one talks about it because no one feels it. that a terrible absence of thought hides behind their words. "i think this," they say. "i think that." the sound of words from a hollow mouth conceals an abyss.
complimentarily so, clune's nicholas often evokes dawes from dow mossman's the stones of summer.
July 20, 2025
I absolutely adored this book. It’s brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that large stretches of it flew straight over my head. As the pages went on, the narrative unraveled into something increasingly philosophical, warped, and surreal. It spirals, it bends, it challenges you to keep up. I loved letting it wash over me, even when I didn’t fully grasp it. It’s the kind of book you feel as much as you read. Not for everyone, but if you're into the strange and cerebral, it’s worth the ride.
3.5 stars. Definitely one to read with others so you can compare notes and confusion.
ALSO THAT COVER IS RIDICULOUSLY BEAUTIFUL. COMPLETELY OBSESSED.
3.5 stars. Definitely one to read with others so you can compare notes and confusion.
ALSO THAT COVER IS RIDICULOUSLY BEAUTIFUL. COMPLETELY OBSESSED.
November 15, 2025
This novel reminded me a bit of something Miranda July might write, but with a more male orientation. Unfortunately I definitely was not the target audience (being 59 years old and female), but it does have a potential. cult novel feel sort of like a Clockwork Orange.
The protagonist, Nick, is a child of divorce who at fifteen years old is experiencing panic attacks. In his quest for understanding of these attacks and how to deal with them, he turns to books, music, drugs, professional help, etc. in search of answers, but also ends up pretty serious about a possible supernatural possession by Pan.
It’s for sure a coming of age story. In some ways I find it big picture interesting. But on a sentence by sentence reading, I quickly lost interest. The characters just weren’t relatable to me personally. I think that’s because I am not the right reader. I hope this book finds its audience. My picture of the ideal reader is unfortunately not a demographic that actually reads novels.
The protagonist, Nick, is a child of divorce who at fifteen years old is experiencing panic attacks. In his quest for understanding of these attacks and how to deal with them, he turns to books, music, drugs, professional help, etc. in search of answers, but also ends up pretty serious about a possible supernatural possession by Pan.
It’s for sure a coming of age story. In some ways I find it big picture interesting. But on a sentence by sentence reading, I quickly lost interest. The characters just weren’t relatable to me personally. I think that’s because I am not the right reader. I hope this book finds its audience. My picture of the ideal reader is unfortunately not a demographic that actually reads novels.
August 25, 2025
In another age, the main character of this novel, Nicholas, would have been described as sensitive. He notices the first glimmers of foliage and passes a note to the girl beside him in class to say "Spring is Here". He is highly attuned to physical sensations, the light saturating the air or the sound of a fly buzzing around the room. He listens to Bach and reads Swann's Way. His mother has dropped him off to live with his father in an edge-of-town cul-de-sac, but rather than engaging directly with his feelings about his parents' divorce and his sudden translocation to this municipal outback, Nicholas turns his attention to the mind itself: he notices that his hand is not simply a hand but a thing; he notices that random thoughts come into his mind and he wonders where thoughts come from. When all this head-spinning introspection results in panic attacks and insomnia, the medical professionals have little help to give. One doctor brusquely advises him to carry around paper bags to breathe into; another doctor monitors his body temperature and tells him to control his breathing; it only makes him more anxious. A psychotherapist eventually diagnoses him with General Anxiety Disorder—but since it's general, he can't prescribe a benzodiazepin, which is for acute, not chronic, anxiety: "If you had come to me when you had panic attacks, I would have treated you with a high-likelihood of success. Now there's nothing I can do." Nicholas is a highly cerebral introvert whose family has disintegrated. Of course, he's anxious. By pathologizing a natural response to this massive life disruption, the doctors only exacerbate his sense of unease. What he needs is support, not diagnosis.
The medical establishment offers an unconvincing theory of his condition, and so Nicholas seeks out a different explanation and course of treatment. The panic attacks, he reasons, must come—logically—from Pan himself, the god of wildness, theatre, and prophecy. His out-of-body dissociations are not the sign of a mental breakdown but of divine possession. All of a sudden, he finds himself in cahoots with a cultish group of high-school misfits all under the sway of a college student named Ian. They carouse in an unused barn, drinking, smoking and taking LSD (Nicholas abstains—it's too much for his nerves) while Ian leads them through a variety of psychotropic rituals, trying to elicit a higher state of consciousness. Ian exercises a fanatic grip over the group who don't seem to realize how crazy everything is: animal sacrifice, mysterious libations, sex surveillance. He offers them all comforting—and ennobling—alternatives to psychiatry and the nostrums of the adult world: Nicholas' problem isn't that he has some irrational anxiety; his condition is entirely rational—"panic is absolute clarity. It sees that only ceaseless vigilance will help us," Ian explains with oracular grandeur. "Instead of trying to flee from the clarity of panic thoughts, dwell with them. With your eyes half-open, sit with them...sit in the half-lotus posture and watch your thoughts," he says as if an enlightened guru delivering a sermon.
It's a humorous and pensive novel that turns the trite stuff of adolescent agony and rebellion into something sensational—something almost magical. In that respect, the novel reminds me of Barry McCrea's The First Verse (about a freshman at the University of Dublin who gets swept up in a cult dedicated to the prophetic art of bibliomancy. Pan, coincidentally, also has a character who divines the future using a book). Both great books, both sort of fizzled at the end. What I most liked was how Clune brought such a perceptive eye to the interiority of a teenager's mind (I loved the gnomic precocity of the line, "the house is a place she looks out from, it's not a place she sees") and there were some amazing moments of wit (the description of Oscar Wilde's plays had a spot-on terseness, "They were about rich people who ate cucumber sandwiches and did things like leave the room.") Overall, a fantastic book.
The medical establishment offers an unconvincing theory of his condition, and so Nicholas seeks out a different explanation and course of treatment. The panic attacks, he reasons, must come—logically—from Pan himself, the god of wildness, theatre, and prophecy. His out-of-body dissociations are not the sign of a mental breakdown but of divine possession. All of a sudden, he finds himself in cahoots with a cultish group of high-school misfits all under the sway of a college student named Ian. They carouse in an unused barn, drinking, smoking and taking LSD (Nicholas abstains—it's too much for his nerves) while Ian leads them through a variety of psychotropic rituals, trying to elicit a higher state of consciousness. Ian exercises a fanatic grip over the group who don't seem to realize how crazy everything is: animal sacrifice, mysterious libations, sex surveillance. He offers them all comforting—and ennobling—alternatives to psychiatry and the nostrums of the adult world: Nicholas' problem isn't that he has some irrational anxiety; his condition is entirely rational—"panic is absolute clarity. It sees that only ceaseless vigilance will help us," Ian explains with oracular grandeur. "Instead of trying to flee from the clarity of panic thoughts, dwell with them. With your eyes half-open, sit with them...sit in the half-lotus posture and watch your thoughts," he says as if an enlightened guru delivering a sermon.
It's a humorous and pensive novel that turns the trite stuff of adolescent agony and rebellion into something sensational—something almost magical. In that respect, the novel reminds me of Barry McCrea's The First Verse (about a freshman at the University of Dublin who gets swept up in a cult dedicated to the prophetic art of bibliomancy. Pan, coincidentally, also has a character who divines the future using a book). Both great books, both sort of fizzled at the end. What I most liked was how Clune brought such a perceptive eye to the interiority of a teenager's mind (I loved the gnomic precocity of the line, "the house is a place she looks out from, it's not a place she sees") and there were some amazing moments of wit (the description of Oscar Wilde's plays had a spot-on terseness, "They were about rich people who ate cucumber sandwiches and did things like leave the room.") Overall, a fantastic book.
July 28, 2025
A brilliant but lonely teenager is stuck in the far-flung Chicago suburbs with his divorced Dad. While in school, he suddenly has a panic attack and this slowly begins to transform and upend the way he sees the world. He is also drawn to some other kids that are experiencing the same life-altering symptoms. The premise of this coming of age novel did draw me in but I am not sure I am the right audience for this cerebral and trippy story. When the narrative stayed closer to the ground I was okay with it but when it when off on it’s quirky, surreal tangents I began to tune out. This has the makings of having a cult following, but I would not connect with that particular cult.
August 29, 2025
For some reason the précis of this book interested me. I read a couple of reviews that persuaded me to read it. Literature about Pan interests me, but when I look at that statement more closely I realise that is because of Machen, no one else. And this has about as little in common with Machen as is possible.
Or Peter Pan maybe, perhaps that is where Clune is aiming.. it’s a book that might be appreciated more by 12 year olds.
Though, my main criticism is its extreme length.. why use one sentence when you could use a paragraph, sort of thing. It takes more than half the book for anything of consequence to happen, and in the first half little happens to develop character other than teenage dialogue exchanges.
I’d hesitate in saying this was a bad choice by me, more the case of inaccurate media publicity. I’m not quite sure who the book should be marketed at, but it’s certainly not me.
Or Peter Pan maybe, perhaps that is where Clune is aiming.. it’s a book that might be appreciated more by 12 year olds.
Though, my main criticism is its extreme length.. why use one sentence when you could use a paragraph, sort of thing. It takes more than half the book for anything of consequence to happen, and in the first half little happens to develop character other than teenage dialogue exchanges.
I’d hesitate in saying this was a bad choice by me, more the case of inaccurate media publicity. I’m not quite sure who the book should be marketed at, but it’s certainly not me.
August 1, 2025
I have been looking forward to this book coming out for months, but it was such a let down. I love a character-driven, coming-of-age story, but this was so poorly executed. The endless analogies were so hard to follow (I'm not sure where to plot that on the VICTORY/DEFEAT and OPEN/CLOSED axis) and I don't care about a bunch of teenagers doing drugs and talking about nothing in a barn. I enjoy books with good writing where very little plot happens, but literally nothing happens in this book.
August 28, 2025
Premise was so good! But the story was a chore and reading it make me anxious and uncomfortable.
August 1, 2025
A hypnotic book, wonderfully written that posits the idea that perhaps anxiety is actually a gift and in-dwelling of the greek god Pan; written with great immediacy from inside the mind of a high schooler experiencing his first panic attack and the spiraling that follows.
September 25, 2025
Wild and weird and very unsettling. Really enjoyed it.
Feels sort of Donny Darko adjacent
Feels sort of Donny Darko adjacent
November 15, 2025
2.75 , maybe 3 stars. For Now.
Honestly.
Let me be honest with you—I have serious mixed feelings about this book, but I love the photos I took for it, so here's a post about it. (This was my sole motivating factor to get these thoughts out; I'm not ashamed to admit it. See my Instagram post if you want to see my book photos. My account is in my profile.) I think the book contains some deep insight; anything intellectually stimulating is worthy of discussion in my opinion. I read 𝘗𝘢𝘯 as an ebook ARC back in August and have been cleverly shirking my responsibility to myself to write a review by letting it fall further and further from my radar. Today was the day. As I've told you before, some days words come effortlessly. I try to honor that. So. Here we are.
𝘗𝘢𝘯's premise was intriguing to me.
It had a captivating elevator pitch:
✅ Coming of age
✅ Panic attacks
✅ The main character thinks he's turning into the god Pan.
✅ Works through everything with the help of some friends, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
15-year-old Nick starts having panic attacks. After trying to talk to (one) therapist, he thinks it's not the solution—the psychiatric professionals are hogwash. He takes matters into his own hands, and what follows is...an acid trip.
(Nick doesn't do any drugs himself, but the friends he gets involved with do.)
The story started out pretty strong; I have a lot highlighted from the time right after Nick determined he was having panic attacks. I think what didn't work for me was the rambling mid-section—an abundance of time was spent with his friends, resulting in some derailment into stoner-YA fiction territory. I didn't like any of Nick's friends or their influence on him, but I can see that these antagonist characters have their purpose. They create conflict. I don't like conflict. It's something I'm working on.
We spend a lot of time in Nick's head (obviously), and some of his thoughts were, for lack of a better word, completely trippy. It did make me feel like I was back in high school dealing with my senior-year boyfriend, who was, among other things, eccentric. That vibe was omnipresent throughout this book.
At times Nick's thoughts were difficult for me to visualize—yes, I need to visualize what I'm reading. I'm a highly visual person. One phrase that he kept referencing repeatedly was that his panic attacks felt like "falling out of my head." It was arduous for me to grasp that one. I couldn't wrap my head around the picture of him falling out of his head. The visuals weren't working for me.
In scrutinizing what I have highlighted in my Kindle, I found a multitude of highly insightful passages and thoughts that the author shared. I think my grievances with the book came down to two things—the friendships and the philosophical knowledge of a teenager. Some of the philosophical concepts presented were DEEP. I found it somewhat unbelievable that a 15-year-old boy suddenly became a "knower of all things" after he started having panic attacks. I think, now, upon further reflection, that this was my biggest issue. I decidedly found it difficult for me to grasp some of the concepts that were put forth; I'll admit I am certainly not far enough into my own self-education in philosophy to grasp certain concepts, and that's ok. It takes time to learn. I was having a distressing time reckoning with the fact that these thoughts are coming out of someone so young (not impossible, of course). I wish I had that much insight when I was that age.
Pan is a book I would definitely like to reread in the future; the potential for greatness is there—I am willing to overlook some of the faults to find it.
From the reviews I've seen, people are at complete ends of the spectrum on this one—either total love or total dislike. For now, I am honestly going to call "Switzerland" and fall dead in the middle.
Honestly.
Let me be honest with you—I have serious mixed feelings about this book, but I love the photos I took for it, so here's a post about it. (This was my sole motivating factor to get these thoughts out; I'm not ashamed to admit it. See my Instagram post if you want to see my book photos. My account is in my profile.) I think the book contains some deep insight; anything intellectually stimulating is worthy of discussion in my opinion. I read 𝘗𝘢𝘯 as an ebook ARC back in August and have been cleverly shirking my responsibility to myself to write a review by letting it fall further and further from my radar. Today was the day. As I've told you before, some days words come effortlessly. I try to honor that. So. Here we are.
𝘗𝘢𝘯's premise was intriguing to me.
It had a captivating elevator pitch:
✅ Coming of age
✅ Panic attacks
✅ The main character thinks he's turning into the god Pan.
✅ Works through everything with the help of some friends, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
15-year-old Nick starts having panic attacks. After trying to talk to (one) therapist, he thinks it's not the solution—the psychiatric professionals are hogwash. He takes matters into his own hands, and what follows is...an acid trip.
(Nick doesn't do any drugs himself, but the friends he gets involved with do.)
The story started out pretty strong; I have a lot highlighted from the time right after Nick determined he was having panic attacks. I think what didn't work for me was the rambling mid-section—an abundance of time was spent with his friends, resulting in some derailment into stoner-YA fiction territory. I didn't like any of Nick's friends or their influence on him, but I can see that these antagonist characters have their purpose. They create conflict. I don't like conflict. It's something I'm working on.
We spend a lot of time in Nick's head (obviously), and some of his thoughts were, for lack of a better word, completely trippy. It did make me feel like I was back in high school dealing with my senior-year boyfriend, who was, among other things, eccentric. That vibe was omnipresent throughout this book.
At times Nick's thoughts were difficult for me to visualize—yes, I need to visualize what I'm reading. I'm a highly visual person. One phrase that he kept referencing repeatedly was that his panic attacks felt like "falling out of my head." It was arduous for me to grasp that one. I couldn't wrap my head around the picture of him falling out of his head. The visuals weren't working for me.
In scrutinizing what I have highlighted in my Kindle, I found a multitude of highly insightful passages and thoughts that the author shared. I think my grievances with the book came down to two things—the friendships and the philosophical knowledge of a teenager. Some of the philosophical concepts presented were DEEP. I found it somewhat unbelievable that a 15-year-old boy suddenly became a "knower of all things" after he started having panic attacks. I think, now, upon further reflection, that this was my biggest issue. I decidedly found it difficult for me to grasp some of the concepts that were put forth; I'll admit I am certainly not far enough into my own self-education in philosophy to grasp certain concepts, and that's ok. It takes time to learn. I was having a distressing time reckoning with the fact that these thoughts are coming out of someone so young (not impossible, of course). I wish I had that much insight when I was that age.
Pan is a book I would definitely like to reread in the future; the potential for greatness is there—I am willing to overlook some of the faults to find it.
From the reviews I've seen, people are at complete ends of the spectrum on this one—either total love or total dislike. For now, I am honestly going to call "Switzerland" and fall dead in the middle.
September 20, 2025
Did not finish at approximately 50% through. Very little arc and the cyclical thinking of the main character was working my last good nerve. So, yeah...onto my next read then...
dnf
August 25, 2025Dnf’d at 50%, Somehow a book about teenagers smoking weed felt too big brained for me
August 26, 2025
Finished Pan in a day. Pan made me think of my middle teenage years, that era where the last wisps of childlike innocence are finally replaced with cynicism or realism (pick your poison). The magic or "mysticism" of childhood plays a heavy role in Pan. In tackling the very adult problem of his growing mental illness, Nicholas and the horrifically bad influences that are his friends resort to ritual and superstition. The journey that comes of this is equal parts interesting and unnerving.
Michael Clune has done a fantastic, almost concerning job displaying the irrationality and alien nature of mental illness. For a subject matter that is extremely subjective and often hard to describe or put into words, Clune has masterfully conveyed a unique and grounded perspective within Pan.
With all that being said, I am docking a star for the single reason that: the ending of this book made me feel stupid. I really enjoyed the arc of the story, but the ending proved neurotic and metaphorical in such a way that I felt lost and confused as to how I was intended to feel. Perhaps a reread will fix this, but right now I feel unsatisfied - and this is compounded by the fact the book is so new there are very few discussion boards about it online.
All in all, if you want a mind-bending journey that delves into the hellpit of anxiety and mental illness - Pan is an amazing and quick read.
Michael Clune has done a fantastic, almost concerning job displaying the irrationality and alien nature of mental illness. For a subject matter that is extremely subjective and often hard to describe or put into words, Clune has masterfully conveyed a unique and grounded perspective within Pan.
With all that being said, I am docking a star for the single reason that: the ending of this book made me feel stupid. I really enjoyed the arc of the story, but the ending proved neurotic and metaphorical in such a way that I felt lost and confused as to how I was intended to feel. Perhaps a reread will fix this, but right now I feel unsatisfied - and this is compounded by the fact the book is so new there are very few discussion boards about it online.
All in all, if you want a mind-bending journey that delves into the hellpit of anxiety and mental illness - Pan is an amazing and quick read.
July 5, 2025
Started out very strong and then wavered a little bit for me towards the end. We are placed in the mind of Nick, a high school student who’s just beginning to experience panic attacks and generalized anxiety. I felt like the description of the feeling of panic attack and the way that Nick rationalizes that experience felt very realistic and true to my own experience of panic attacks - it also felt a little funny (positively). As a young man Nick is trying to put meaning to everything going on around him, and does sort of a bad job of that - also in a funny way. He falls in with a crowd of other kids who are experimenting with drugs and spending their summer days in a barn. That’s where I started to waver. I think Clune was trying to do too much / bring in too many ideas and because of that there seemed to be a lot of loose ends and plot lines that felt random. I would’ve liked if it had been longer or if several things were cut out. Probably would rate it somewhere like a 3.5.
I’m thankful to have gotten the opportunity to read an advanced copy and look forward to the publication on July 22.
I’m thankful to have gotten the opportunity to read an advanced copy and look forward to the publication on July 22.
August 7, 2025
This was a strange experience.
On the surface it's about a fifteen/sixteen year old boy with anxiety but then again it also feels like a drug trip, which may be because his "friends" are always on drugs. But also it somehow shows what happens if people don't get help with mental health.
It's a weird book. It made my chest feel heavy but also it calmed me down weirdly. I can't really describe it. Which is - I think - what the book wanted to achieve.
It does feel like the rambling of a scared and mentally ill fifteen year old. Which is very fitting.
I did not really appreciate the one instance of the f-slur and the one instance of the r-slur but then again the kids in this book would use this word.
It just very much shows neglected teenagers, without any guidance and what can happen to them.
On the surface it's about a fifteen/sixteen year old boy with anxiety but then again it also feels like a drug trip, which may be because his "friends" are always on drugs. But also it somehow shows what happens if people don't get help with mental health.
It's a weird book. It made my chest feel heavy but also it calmed me down weirdly. I can't really describe it. Which is - I think - what the book wanted to achieve.
It does feel like the rambling of a scared and mentally ill fifteen year old. Which is very fitting.
I did not really appreciate the one instance of the f-slur and the one instance of the r-slur but then again the kids in this book would use this word.
It just very much shows neglected teenagers, without any guidance and what can happen to them.
August 2, 2025
'90s novel vibes
TL:DR: Mentally ill teens do lots of drugs, get really pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, dysfunctional families, blah blah blah, Something Bad Happens to most of them at the end, but we're not told what. The End.
It's like "Less Than Zero" and "The Secret History" got blended together into a slurry. Hard pass.
TL:DR: Mentally ill teens do lots of drugs, get really pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, dysfunctional families, blah blah blah, Something Bad Happens to most of them at the end, but we're not told what. The End.
It's like "Less Than Zero" and "The Secret History" got blended together into a slurry. Hard pass.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 299 reviews