Mongrels

An unnamed narrator grows up in a family of werewolves drifting across the American South, raised by his aunt Libby and uncle Darren after his mother, Jessica, died the day he was born. The novel spans roughly eight years of his life, from age eight to 16, as the family moves constantly to evade discovery.

The story begins in Arkansas, where the narrator, nearly eight, lives in his grandfather's house. Grandpa tells elaborate werewolf stories, but his health is failing. He has aged far beyond his 55 years because werewolves "age like dogs," burning through their lifespans with each shift. Darren, 22, has recently returned after leaving home at 16, the age at which all males in the family strike out on their own. He has come back to protect Libby, Jessica's twin, from Red, her violent ex-husband.

As Grandpa declines, the narrator pieces together the true story of his birth. Grandpa's tale about killing a rabid dog with a ball-peen hammer is really about Jessica: She carried the wolf blood, and when the baby shifted during birth, the narrator's dewclaws tore her open and killed her. The scars on the narrator's forearms mark where Libby bit off those claws at birth. Grandpa dies half-shifted in the kitchen doorway, his legs transformed to wolf shape. Darren buries him with a stolen front-end loader, crushing the bones. That same night, Darren returns from town with a dead state trooper's gun belt, having killed the officer during a robbery. Libby slashes Darren's face with her claws, forces him to become a truck driver, and they burn the house and flee Arkansas.

The family spends years bouncing between Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. The novel interweaves the narrator's account with sections labeled by different identities, such as "the reporter," "the criminal," and "the mechanic." Throughout, Libby and Darren educate him in werewolf survival: Burn the trash every night so a shifted wolf does not eat tin-can lids and die from the inside; never wear stretch pants, which fuse with the skin during transformation. Darren nicks his own finger on a silver throwing star, sparking an infection that refuses to heal because silver resists werewolf regeneration.

The central tension of the narrator's life is that he has not shifted. Libby quietly hopes he never will, wanting him to have the normal life Jessica never had. Darren treats the transformation as inevitable, filling the narrator with lore and survival skills. The narrator desperately wants to change, yet he secretly savors human food like hot dogs that he would never eat in front of his family, revealing the gap between his appetites and the identity he craves.

In Bridgeport, Texas, when the narrator is 13, Libby disappears after involuntarily beginning to shift. The narrator and Darren track her to Decatur, where she is in full wolf form fighting dogcatchers. The narrator tackles a police officer aiming a revolver at her, and Darren shoots Libby with the fallen gun to incapacitate her before the authorities use lethal force. They retrieve her the next morning from Animal Control, where she sits wounded in a kennel, shifted back to human form. Darren bites off his own infected finger at the front desk as a distraction, and the 13-year-old narrator drives them out of Texas.

In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the family visits Morris Wexler, a man Libby bit and left comatose years earlier. In his hospital room, the narrator finds a photograph of Libby at 18, and because she and Jessica were identical twins, he sees his mother's face for the first time.

In Georgia, at 14, the narrator falls for Brittany Caine Andrews, a girl who believes he is a werewolf. She wants the "wolf kiss," a bite delivered mid-shift that supposedly transmits the wolf safely. Her grandfather turns out to be an ancient werewolf protecting Brittany by educating her about their kind. When the old wolf breaks into the narrator's bedroom one night, too frail to complete his shift, Darren crashes through the wall and kills him. Before the family leaves, Brittany bares her neck to the narrator in the school gym. He sets his teeth against her skin and prays not to change, wanting to remain in this human moment. Whether it is a kiss or a bite, he does not say.

In South Carolina, the narrator discovers that a wildlife biologist has been tracking the family by analyzing werewolf scat. He breaks into her RV and finds a photograph of her husband: the Arkansas state trooper Darren killed the night they fled. She has followed the thinning pattern of roadkill along Southern highways, since Darren always stops to check if dead animals on the road are wolves he knows.

Near Augusta, approaching 16, the narrator encounters a "sheep," a werewolf who has stopped shifting and lives as an ordinary citizen. The sheep confesses that he suppressed the wolf so long that he ate his own wife. The narrator chooses not to reveal the sheep's location to Libby.

Back in Florida, Darren goes missing from a job at NMV Exterminators. The narrator investigates and connects with Grace-Ellen, the company's receptionist, whose husband, a werewolf named Trigo, also vanished. Grace-Ellen slashes the narrator with a silver cockfighting spur, and the silver burns in his blood, proving he carries the wolf even if he cannot shift. She saves him with an old remedy. Together they uncover the truth: NMV has been harvesting werewolf urine as a pesticide. They find Darren imprisoned in a shark cage beneath the warehouse, starving and broken. Trigo's body is in a chest freezer nearby. Libby herds the exterminator Rayford onto a highway, where a semi truck kills him.

During recovery, Darren reveals the truth about the narrator's father: He was the sole survivor of a rival pack Grandpa massacred, and he hid in town for 14 years before seducing Jessica as revenge, knowing the pregnancy would kill her. The narrator is "part sheep," which may explain his inability to shift. Grace-Ellen shares a secret Grandpa spent his dying years seeking: Wearing silver earrings during pregnancy suppresses the wolf in the baby enough to survive birth. Grace-Ellen is pregnant with Darren's child. They marry, and for the first time, the family permanently splits. At the docks, the narrator gives Darren a velvet ring box containing his mother's lock of hair, asking him to take her out on the water.

Three weeks before the final scene, in a Texas motel room, the narrator shifts for the first time. His tongue thickens, his spine locks and thrusts apart, claws push through his fingers, and his knees reverse. He passes out and wakes as a wolf, unable to work the doorknob. Libby returns, tastes the change in the air, and holds him.

The novel closes on a dirt road at the edge of Arkansas. Libby undresses, shifts, and runs across a meadow toward the trees, where Red waits in wolf form. She has kept her promise to Jessica, raising the narrator to adulthood. The narrator watches her go. He has been writing their story in a shoe box inside a faded blue backpack, and Libby has told him to burn it. The novel ends with his refusal: "I'll never burn this, Libby. That's all."