Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Stephen Graham Jones knows the horror genre, it's not any kind of surprise that he's done a werewolf novel, or that it's very good. The big surprise, really is that his werewolves aren't explicitly Native Americans (though there's a strong case they're very much in an underclass, the closest thing I can think of in real-world America would be like the Roma) but that's probably at least a little bit of a bad expectation being justly rewarded. The telling is very nonlinear, which makes the novel seem either less episodic than it is, or more episodic than it is; it does make the arc of the novel hard to discern and harder to predict--the latter probably being more the intent. Some of the chapters are in first-person and some in third, but that's not any kind of distraction or other problem. The narrative voice is pretty believably a young person waiting to "grow up" and become a werewolf. The underworld the novel describes is believably desperate; the people in it almost distressing in their plausibility. The dialogue is sharp, at times coming close to drawing blood. Really, really good stuff, here.