Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is billed as a horror novel, but I don’t see it. My guesses are this label arises from the werewolf subject matter, or Jones’ reputation as a writer of horror. (And just like that I’m back on my old complaint about how author expectations confuse genre, like Stephen King’s Elevation infuriatingly winning last year’s Goodreads Choice Award for Horror, though it's not remotely horror!) Genre is complicated, and yeah I wrote recently about how I don’t scare easily from books, but I’d argue a book can fail to scare you and still feel like horror, and this book conversely had some big scary vibes, but it didn’t feel like horror. Before I go further, I want to clarify that none of this is to say that this book fell short for me, I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT.⁣⁣⁣
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At one point while reading I described this novel to my husband as like Jesmin Ward’s Salvage the Bones but with werewolves, which is honestly an imperfect comparison (and not just because he hasn’t even read that novel