“Everybody goes to jail at some point, don’t they?”

In Mongrels, considered a coming-of-age story, our nameless protagonist learns about werewolf lore through the stories told by his grandfather, aunt, and uncle, Libby and Darren. After his grandfather’s death, the protagonist and his family go on the run. During this time, the protagonist learns about the dangerous life of a werewolf while acquiring his own stories.

One of this novel’s unique elements is our nameless protagonist’s nonlinear narrative. As the protagonist is reacting to a present-day issue, he attaches the issue to the stories told by his grandfather about werewolf lore from the concept of ‘moondogs’ and ‘partial kills.’ For the nameless protagonist, the survival of werewolves relates to a story laces within their lore. The unnamed protagonist rationalizes every decision and reaction by Libby and Darren by reflecting on his grandfather’s stories about his young werewolf years. As the story progresses, this small family unit drifts from state to state, trying to escape elements from their past. Even as Libby hopes for our nameless protagonist to be spared the werewolf’s life, she and Darren still tell him stories to prepare for possible situations as a werewolf. One drive of this novel is to see if the family unit gets their happy ending. And, I am not entirely sure they receive it, but for our nameless protagonist, the werewolf life is all he has been taught, and after gaining his claws; he is at a sense of peace and, I would argue, happiness.

 

Due to my reading this novel for a class, I kept analyzing the text as I read. During my read, I kept thinking about how Graham expands on werewolf lore, but I couldn’t help but compare the werewolf lore to Twilight. Famously, yet questionable, Stephanie Meyer attached the werewolf label to the real-life Quileute tribe. As I first began reading Mongrels, I questioned if Graham-Jones was reclaiming this imagery attached to Indigenous people as ‘shifters’ and ‘otherworldly.’ Or perhaps, since Graham-Jones is a horror fan, he wanted to expand werewolf lore rather than attempting to reclaim a questionable trope associated with Indigenous people. It is difficult for me to not make the comparison to that of Indigenous people within pop-culture media, especially after Darren indicates films misrepresent werewolves. As the novel delves into the gory nature of werewolves, at the heart of the story is a family attempting to live their lives despite the hardships following them. Even in the end, our protagonist has written down his stories before his transition despite Libby demanding he burns them. For him, being a werewolf is tied to his heritage, and these stories are his family history. Perhaps I am reading too close, but these stories told to the nameless protagonist lie in truth, while pieces are left out but still present multiple roads for him. The novel’s ending suggests that the unnamed protagonist’s future is uncertain, but perhaps the written family history could provide him with a guideline for survival.