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(full review on my blog here: http://shelfstalker.weebly.com/shelf-stalker/mongrels-stephen-graham-jones)
There’s nothing new to say about werewolves. Silver bullets, pentagrams on the palm, sudden urges for rare steak, howling, full moon transformations, bloodthirsty beasts rampaging about. We’ve seen it all, right?
Well, think again. As Jones, veteran speculative fiction writer, shows, there’s plenty more to tell, plenty more waiting to burst through to the surface. And some of what we think we know might need to be rewritten.
Of course you don’t believe in werewolves, right? Why would you? But maybe all those stories your grandpa told you weren’t just stories. Maybe he wasn’t just going senile when he talked about shifting and chasing after chickens, coming home bloody-jawed but satisfied. You always kept him talking because it seemed to make him happy, but what happens when all those stories turn out to be true?
Mongrels follows a young unnamed narrator and his aunt Libby and uncle Darren across the southern United States. They don’t have much except for each other and their secret: theirs is a family of wolves. Our narrator is a late bloomer and might never turn into a wolf, though he desperately wants to become a werewolf in order to fit into his little family. He sure as hell doesn’t think he’ll ever fit in anywhere else. In that sense, this is a coming-of-age story more than any other type of story. It’s a boy trying to figure out who he is, where he fits in the world, and dealing with his family and more embarrassingly, his body.
If there really are werewolves wandering around in the twenty-first century, I suspect they fit more into Jones’s model. Moving around a lot, staying away from other people, doing odd jobs, getting mixed up with the cops a little too frequently. Our narrator and his family try to stay out of trouble, but it seems to find them anyways. Finding out that he is a werewolf is really just the beginning. The rest of the book is finding out how to deal with it and keep it all a secret.
The book is really about finding a way to be comfortable with who you are and who your family is, and then being proud of it, even if you can’t share it with the world. What is it that Libby and Darren are really running away from every time they move on? Every time they cause enough trouble so that they have to move on? Wolves don’t seem able to form lasting attachments, but there sure are wounds in their past that cut deep and haven’t healed yet.
In true Jones fashion, this book gets crazy, this book gets weird (werewolves are valuable for something I bet you’ll never guess), but mostly, this book gets under your skin—in a good way. Like how werewolf hair sucks back in, it’ll get inside of you and leave pieces of itself behind.
There’s nothing new to say about werewolves. Silver bullets, pentagrams on the palm, sudden urges for rare steak, howling, full moon transformations, bloodthirsty beasts rampaging about. We’ve seen it all, right?
Well, think again. As Jones, veteran speculative fiction writer, shows, there’s plenty more to tell, plenty more waiting to burst through to the surface. And some of what we think we know might need to be rewritten.
Of course you don’t believe in werewolves, right? Why would you? But maybe all those stories your grandpa told you weren’t just stories. Maybe he wasn’t just going senile when he talked about shifting and chasing after chickens, coming home bloody-jawed but satisfied. You always kept him talking because it seemed to make him happy, but what happens when all those stories turn out to be true?
Mongrels follows a young unnamed narrator and his aunt Libby and uncle Darren across the southern United States. They don’t have much except for each other and their secret: theirs is a family of wolves. Our narrator is a late bloomer and might never turn into a wolf, though he desperately wants to become a werewolf in order to fit into his little family. He sure as hell doesn’t think he’ll ever fit in anywhere else. In that sense, this is a coming-of-age story more than any other type of story. It’s a boy trying to figure out who he is, where he fits in the world, and dealing with his family and more embarrassingly, his body.
If there really are werewolves wandering around in the twenty-first century, I suspect they fit more into Jones’s model. Moving around a lot, staying away from other people, doing odd jobs, getting mixed up with the cops a little too frequently. Our narrator and his family try to stay out of trouble, but it seems to find them anyways. Finding out that he is a werewolf is really just the beginning. The rest of the book is finding out how to deal with it and keep it all a secret.
The book is really about finding a way to be comfortable with who you are and who your family is, and then being proud of it, even if you can’t share it with the world. What is it that Libby and Darren are really running away from every time they move on? Every time they cause enough trouble so that they have to move on? Wolves don’t seem able to form lasting attachments, but there sure are wounds in their past that cut deep and haven’t healed yet.
In true Jones fashion, this book gets crazy, this book gets weird (werewolves are valuable for something I bet you’ll never guess), but mostly, this book gets under your skin—in a good way. Like how werewolf hair sucks back in, it’ll get inside of you and leave pieces of itself behind.