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I’ve not read anything by Stephen Graham Jones before, but his name has been coming up pretty regularly, as an Indigenous author and horror author who’s apparently been putting out some bangers lately. I was on the hunt for an audiobook to listen to while snowed in, and while searching for werewolf books, his 2016 novel Mongrels popped up. I’d never heard of Mongrels, but as a certified Fan of Werewolves who’d been meaning to check out something by Jones anyway, it was pretty win/win.
Mongrels is about an unnamed boy in a family of werewolves, born to a single mother who died in childbirth and raised by his grandfather, Aunt Libby, and Uncle Darren. When his grandfather passes away, the three remaining family members live a nomadic life, traveling across much of the American South on the hunt for a place where his aunt and uncle can find work and maybe live for a few months without too much hassle. The novel is mostly told through first-person vignettes, with each chapter working fairly well as a standalone short story about the same characters, interspersed with much shorter, usually more humorous, stories told in third person. As the protagonist grows up, he learns more and more about life as a werewolf, the many measures his aunt and uncle take to work around difficulties with the transformation process and werewolf social norms. Despite this, he keeps missing every opportunity to transform, until he’s well past the age at which he could even be considered a late bloomer.
Werewolves are a useful metaphor for disability and queerness, but here, they instead work as a metaphor for poverty or being undocumented, or life on the fringes more broadly. It makes sense and comes from a similar place - the werewolf metaphor is strongest to me when it’s about those times when being true to oneself or living authentically means that society more broadly views you as without dignity, or less than human. That’s why so many lesser werewolf stories lean into lurid shock value over sexual assault and other acts that actually do justifiably cause society to judge the people who do them. I guess that’s what happens when people who don’t experience - and can’t imagine - marginalization try to write a book about being marginalized.
Mongrels is refreshingly free of lurid objectification or sexualization, which is honestly a bit of a miracle for werewolf fiction. Instead, the protagonist is a child who’s mostly getting the descriptions of what it is like to be a werewolf second-hand. The book doesn’t have a power fantasy at its center because its protagonist doesn’t experience any of the power. He just has to live the life stripped of continuity and deal with the repercussions of his aunt and uncle’s actions as wolves without getting to run free in the woods or hunt for deer or scare the people who threaten him. Throughout, it led me to ask: is it useful that he’s learning so much about the werewolf life? He wants to drop out of school like his aunt and uncle because school isn’t useful for werewolves. But…like…it is useful for humans who don’t turn into wolves, and he’s increasingly looking like maybe he’s not a wolf.
That’s kinda the question at the heart of the novel. What will this kid’s life look like if he turns out not to be a werewolf? He starts most chapters with a fact about “us wolves,” but then often undercuts it by acknowledging that what he just said doesn’t actually apply to him yet - but it will, as soon as he changes for the first time! This leads me to wonder if that’s partly the point. Many of the facts about werewolves aren’t really werewolf things so much as they are things a family resorts to when they’re barely subsisting on the margins of society, like getting what education you can from watching game shows or knowing how to shoplift food. Just as the protagonist is learning life skills that won’t necessarily be useful in life, marginalized families often are forced to impart to their children survival methods that won’t carry over if they manage to claw their way out of the margins. It’s setting them up for failure, in a way, but out of necessity. As the protagonist points out at one point, werewolves can’t afford to think about the past or the future - the only thing that can matter is right now.
I really enjoyed Mongrels, but it took me a little time to sink into it. I think I was expecting something a lot more violent or disturbing, and the book’s relative calm ironically caught me off-guard. To my mind, it’s not really a horror novel. There’s a little gore here and there, but never in a way that seemed purposely unsettling. It’s primarily a funny and bittersweet coming-of-age story about a boy whose aunt and uncle are doing the best they can to raise him (though really his aunt’s best is better than his uncle’s). But, you know, with werewolves.
Mongrels is about an unnamed boy in a family of werewolves, born to a single mother who died in childbirth and raised by his grandfather, Aunt Libby, and Uncle Darren. When his grandfather passes away, the three remaining family members live a nomadic life, traveling across much of the American South on the hunt for a place where his aunt and uncle can find work and maybe live for a few months without too much hassle. The novel is mostly told through first-person vignettes, with each chapter working fairly well as a standalone short story about the same characters, interspersed with much shorter, usually more humorous, stories told in third person. As the protagonist grows up, he learns more and more about life as a werewolf, the many measures his aunt and uncle take to work around difficulties with the transformation process and werewolf social norms. Despite this, he keeps missing every opportunity to transform, until he’s well past the age at which he could even be considered a late bloomer.
Werewolves are a useful metaphor for disability and queerness, but here, they instead work as a metaphor for poverty or being undocumented, or life on the fringes more broadly. It makes sense and comes from a similar place - the werewolf metaphor is strongest to me when it’s about those times when being true to oneself or living authentically means that society more broadly views you as without dignity, or less than human. That’s why so many lesser werewolf stories lean into lurid shock value over sexual assault and other acts that actually do justifiably cause society to judge the people who do them. I guess that’s what happens when people who don’t experience - and can’t imagine - marginalization try to write a book about being marginalized.
Mongrels is refreshingly free of lurid objectification or sexualization, which is honestly a bit of a miracle for werewolf fiction. Instead, the protagonist is a child who’s mostly getting the descriptions of what it is like to be a werewolf second-hand. The book doesn’t have a power fantasy at its center because its protagonist doesn’t experience any of the power. He just has to live the life stripped of continuity and deal with the repercussions of his aunt and uncle’s actions as wolves without getting to run free in the woods or hunt for deer or scare the people who threaten him. Throughout, it led me to ask: is it useful that he’s learning so much about the werewolf life? He wants to drop out of school like his aunt and uncle because school isn’t useful for werewolves. But…like…it is useful for humans who don’t turn into wolves, and he’s increasingly looking like maybe he’s not a wolf.
That’s kinda the question at the heart of the novel. What will this kid’s life look like if he turns out not to be a werewolf? He starts most chapters with a fact about “us wolves,” but then often undercuts it by acknowledging that what he just said doesn’t actually apply to him yet - but it will, as soon as he changes for the first time! This leads me to wonder if that’s partly the point. Many of the facts about werewolves aren’t really werewolf things so much as they are things a family resorts to when they’re barely subsisting on the margins of society, like getting what education you can from watching game shows or knowing how to shoplift food. Just as the protagonist is learning life skills that won’t necessarily be useful in life, marginalized families often are forced to impart to their children survival methods that won’t carry over if they manage to claw their way out of the margins. It’s setting them up for failure, in a way, but out of necessity. As the protagonist points out at one point, werewolves can’t afford to think about the past or the future - the only thing that can matter is right now.
I really enjoyed Mongrels, but it took me a little time to sink into it. I think I was expecting something a lot more violent or disturbing, and the book’s relative calm ironically caught me off-guard. To my mind, it’s not really a horror novel. There’s a little gore here and there, but never in a way that seemed purposely unsettling. It’s primarily a funny and bittersweet coming-of-age story about a boy whose aunt and uncle are doing the best they can to raise him (though really his aunt’s best is better than his uncle’s). But, you know, with werewolves.