Spoiler Warning: I tried to keep this spoiler free as best I could. I do talk a bit about the ending, but I warn about trying to avoid spoilers before I get into it. If you’re someone who’s very sensitive to spoilers, you may just want to stop at that point.
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge – Book 14 – Read a horror novel by a BIPOC author
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
I picked this because Jones is a Native American horror writer. He also usually writes about Native American characters and I think the characters in this are Native American although I don’t think it is explicitly stated.
Star Rating: ★★★☆☆
What is This Book About?
Mongrels is a werewolf novel about a family of werewolves (an aunt, an uncle, and their nephew) and their travels around the U.S. throughout the nephew’s life. It’s a werewolf novel in the same vein as Anne Rice’s vampire novels where it’s mostly focused on the lore and the lives of werewolves, rather than being a ‘scary’ book. So it’s a bit more verging on fantasy about a traditional horror creature than outright horror.
It’s also a coming-of-age novel. The nephew is the POV character and at the start of the book he is not a werewolf yet and may never be a werewolf. In this universe there’s sort of a change people with werewolf blood go through where they either become a werewolf or stay a human. So a big focus of the novel is him wondering if he’ll become a werewolf like his relatives and wanting to be a werewolf so he can be like them.
Young Adult or Adult?
This book is an adult book, but I do see it tagged a lot as young adult, I think because it is a coming-of-age novel and has a child/teenager as the POV character. It does feel like the themes and topics it’s covering would fit for a young adult audience too. The only reason I would say it’s not a young adult book is because of some of the animal cruelty and things like that that come up periodically. In the parts that don’t have any of that though, it does feel like something that could be read and enjoyed by a younger audience.
I almost wish he would have toned down some of the harder subject matter and had it be a YA novel. Or, conversely, had it have adult POVs and been a more graphic story. This way it felt sort of half-and-half and like I was reading a YA novel that had some more inappropriate stuff randomly peppered in.
What Did I Think of It?
I liked a lot of elements of this, but I didn’t like all of it.
I already like Anne Rice’s vampire novels, so when I’m comparing it to that, it is meant as a compliment. I like when authors take a traditional horror monster and create something new with their backstory. I’m not sure if Jones was pulling from something already existing or if this was entirely his creation, but his werewolves were very unique to me.
I also did grow to like the uncle’s story as it went on. He’s actually the one who I think has the most going on and I wish he would have been the POV character.
Most of the reason I rated the book lower is because of the POV character and the style of writing. I don’t think the younger POV character added anything to the book for me, I would have preferred if it had been one of the adult characters. It’s also told as a series of vignettes from their lives and in a non-chronological order. I would have preferred it to be chronological.
Also, once it got toward the end and tried to have a plot, I felt like it could have been a bit more focused. To try to avoid spoilers, basically, it ends up being about the uncle learning that he can be a werewolf, but also live a human life and not need to be running from town-to-town like they have been. The nephew’s ‘wanting to be a werewolf’ storyline also gets resolved, but to be honest that storyline didn’t do much for me anyway, so I didn’t really care that much about it. I think I would have preferred it if it had been from the uncle’s POV and his character growth had been the focus because I think his story would have been more compelling.
This sort of felt like it was short stories that had been cobbled together into a novel. Which isn’t bad, but also isn’t great.
A Book in Three Acts 