Wolfsong

Joe Bennett is the novel’s deuteragonist, a dynamic romantic foil whose transformation mirrors and completes Ox’s. As a child, Joe’s trauma haunts him; kidnapped and tortured for eight weeks, he returns home mute and haunted, a figure both innocent and damaged. Richard Collins’s psychological torture convinced Joe that he was worthless and unwanted—a parallel to Ox’s father’s legacy. His first words after the trauma—spoken to Ox—are a sensory outpouring rather that foreshadows the strength of his bond with Ox and their communication through shared sensory experiences.

As Joe gets older, the novel uses him to explore the intersection of power, trauma, and agency. Destined to become Alpha, Joe must learn to balance his wolf with his humanity. His journey is both personal and psychological: He must learn how to wield strength without succumbing to rage and how to love without possession. His courtship of Ox shows Alphadom can exist with sincerity and vulnerability. Joe is a werewolf who could claim but chooses instead to ask for consent.

Klune also uses Joe’s moments of jealousy to interrogate the legacy of masculinity. When he admits, “[Collins] made me want to be a monster, and I don’t always think I can stop it,” Joe articulates one of the novel’s deepest fears: that power, untempered by love, can easily become cruelty. His redemption lies in allowing himself to need Ox. By the novel’s close, Joe embodies a new archetype: the Alpha who co-leads through vulnerability.

If Ox is the novel’s heart, Gordo is its conscience. He serves as a father figure after Ox’s father abandons him and models how to be a gay man who is confident in his identity and accepting of others. A witch bound to the Bennett pack since childhood, Gordo serves as both mentor and foil to Ox. Gordo still carries some reactive traits, and as the novel progresses, he represents the danger of closing oneself off. His sardonic tone and emotional distance conceal a loneliness rooted in old betrayals. When he warns Ox to stay away from the Bennetts, his bitterness masks a wound the reader only later understands: that he was once tethered to Mark Bennett, his love, and felt abandoned when he left. In this way, his story mirrors Ox’s—who is abandoned both by his father and Joe.

Gordo wears emotional armor, his glowing tattoos serving as symbols of his magical powers and the memories that haunt him. As the story unfolds, Gordo’s arc traces the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness. His eventual return to the pack and his role in defending Green Creek signify a homecoming. When Ox asks if he’s still Gordo’s tether, and he answers yes, the admission collapses years of guardedness. Gordo’s magic has always been about connection. Klune leaves him scarred but softened, a reminder that cynicism can protect, but only love can heal.

Thomas, the Alpha of the Bennett pack, functions as both the archetypal “good father” and the voice of the novel’s ethics. As an Alpha, he embodies love and service. His leadership rejects aggression and domination in favor of stewardship. When Thomas takes Ox into the woods and tells him that the pack will need him, his role extends beyond the werewolf hierarchy.

Klune uses Thomas to rewrite paternal archetypes. Where Ox’s father equates manhood with control and silence, Thomas models a form of masculinity grounded in empathy. He cooks, touches, listens, and mentors. His strength comes not from physical power but from emotional transparency. He leads through presence and attention. The detail that Joe and Ox often walk with him through the forest captures his style of mentorship: quiet, patient, rooted in observation.

Thomas’s death at Richard Collins’ hands transforms him from man into myth, but Klune resists idealizing him. His legacy is complex—part moral code, part burden. In urging mercy over revenge, Thomas leaves Joe and Ox to wrestle with the limits of forgiveness. Even in death he remains the moral and ethical center of the story, an embodiment of masculinity that leads by love, not fear.

Elizabeth is a secondary character and the matriarch of the pack. She is a spiritual touchstone and a mother figure who helps initiate Ox into pack life. A painter whose work hangs in museums, she represents creativity, intuition, and maternal strength, traits that Klune aligns with leadership rather than gender. Her artistry parallels Gordo’s magic and Thomas’s moral wisdom, situating femininity as an equally vital form of power in pack and family hierarchy.

Her characterization is built through gesture and presence rather than exposition. She feeds, comforts, and heals when she invites Ox to dinner, including him in an important pack tradition. In this way, she provides Ox with the warm atmosphere of a large, supportive family that he lacked. Her love language is inclusion, but just like Ox, she is susceptible to isolation. After Thomas’s death, she spends months in wolf form, representing an emotional withdrawal. When she finally shifts back to human form, prompted by Ox’s courage to face his own grief, the act becomes a point of communal rebirth.

Elizabeth’s role complicates gender expectations of femininity in similar ways to Klune’s complication of masculinity. She is nurturing without being passive and powerful without being domineering. While her art, patience, and domestic roles are associated with traditional Western gender norms for women, she is also a role model for Ox, who at first believes that, as Joe’s partner, he’ll be taking on Elizabeth’s role as leader of the pack’s domestic life and a support figure. He does take on these roles, but as a human Alpha, showing that character rather than gender defines one’s qualities as a leader.

Ox’s mother is a secondary character, who represents ordinary courage in a world of supernatural stakes. A single parent and waitress, she grounds the novel in realism. Her resilience—working long shifts, keeping a home, and maintaining optimism despite poverty—contrasts the Bennetts’ magical and mythical aura. Klune writes Maggie as a symbol of human endurance, not magical but no less extraordinary.

Maggie’s most defining trait is her capacity for joy. When Gordo offers financial help and she flirts through her tears, or when she gives Ox a “where-wolf” birthday card, her humor cuts through the despair of hardship. Maggie’s ability to find laughter in loss and struggle models emotional intelligence long before Ox learns to name it.

Her relationship with Ox also defines nurturing and caring. She allows him to make choices, even risky ones, trusting his intuition with the Bennetts and foreshadowing Ox’s later leadership philosophy. Maggie’s death carries profound symbolic and emotional weight. Her final act—fighting back against the Omega who held her—cements her bravery. In mourning her, the pack shows that they fully accept humans on equal terms.