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Mother Howl
Compelling literary crime that follows the son of a serial murderer who changes his identity in a bid to escape his past.
Sixteen-year-old Lyle Edison recognizes the face of a murder victim on the nightly news – the waitress at his local diner. A place he often frequented with his dad. The following day his father is arrested and charged with her murder. And then eight further bodies are discovered.
Following the revelation that his dad is in fact a serial killer, Lyle is outcast and shunned. Forced to abandon his family, illegally obtaining a new identity, he moves away to start all over again.
Some years later, Lyle thinks he has finally moved on. But after several brushes with the law, Lyle’s past eventually catches up to him when a mysterious stranger known only as Icarus shows up and seems to know Lyle’s secret…
Sixteen-year-old Lyle Edison recognizes the face of a murder victim on the nightly news – the waitress at his local diner. A place he often frequented with his dad. The following day his father is arrested and charged with her murder. And then eight further bodies are discovered.
Following the revelation that his dad is in fact a serial killer, Lyle is outcast and shunned. Forced to abandon his family, illegally obtaining a new identity, he moves away to start all over again.
Some years later, Lyle thinks he has finally moved on. But after several brushes with the law, Lyle’s past eventually catches up to him when a mysterious stranger known only as Icarus shows up and seems to know Lyle’s secret…
301 pages, Paperback
First published June 13, 2023
80 people are currently reading
4764 people want to read
About the author
Craig Clevenger
16 books936 followersAuthor of books frequently borrowed but seldom returned.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
May 28, 2023
3.5 Stars
This is a slower paced character driven narrative that explores the scars of our pasts. The writing was simple, but solid. I liked the story but not one that I found particularly immersive or engrossing.
I would primarily recommend this one to readers who prefer slow burning character studies.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
This is a slower paced character driven narrative that explores the scars of our pasts. The writing was simple, but solid. I liked the story but not one that I found particularly immersive or engrossing.
I would primarily recommend this one to readers who prefer slow burning character studies.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
April 8, 2023
Dark literary fiction following Lyle as he tries to escape from his past and avoid becoming like his serial killer father. Beautifully written with a bit of a noir vibe plus a different element (sci-fi? urban fantasy? magical realism?) Highly recommended if you like flawed characters and ambiguous stories. It's wonderful to see another novel from Craig Clevenger after so many years!
April 25, 2025
There's a great book in here, I'm just not in the right mind set to push through...
Maybe later on..
Thanks to the publisher for the ARC copy.
Maybe later on..
Thanks to the publisher for the ARC copy.
November 17, 2023
Did ya know his Diner Noir book is more recent? Though this isn’t initially as slangy as Craig Clevenger’s piece from In Filth It Shall Be Found or as drug-drenched as Dermaphoria, it is like an easier to follow Contortionist’s Handbook (all great). Here, 17 y/o Lyle wants a new identity because the father he shares a name w/ is the town murderer—even to girls his son fancies. While he’s in prison, this Lyle is treated as badly, ignored by even government agencies when he wants to change his name. There’s a stripped version of the author's specific evocative images like Lyle’s school crush w/ green ribbons and a cardboard-scraped roadkill cat. Once he bribes someone to "legally" change his name to Edison, we get a time jump to where he’s on probation for being a drug dealer, so he’s in NA meetings after a Pursey-style cop tosses his apartment.
Icarus is another POV who thinks he’s beyond Earth so tried to kill himself so winds up in a psych ward, much like the soul-transporters in Craig’s piece Sunder from Filth. He’s blunt in the charming way of a southern black man (but maybe that’s the Audible narrator’s spin). He speaks of Mother Howl, what he personifies the universe as. “Silly String Theory,” medicine as “brain candy,” “I know you think I’m a foilhead who thinks Elvis shot Kennedy or something… PTA been after me for years” make me smile.
Lyle has so many coincidental run-ins with the law, I wouldn’t believe him as a cop either. He makes stupid decisions like getting involved between a petty criminal and Korean store owner. His good deed def comes off like he’s pals with the thief. If I was his wife, I’d get close to stabbing him over all his dumb decisions and how he doesn’t seem to love their baby besides keeping up a front or just to get his wife off his back. It shouldn’t take the threat of jail to wanna spend time w/ the kid. Good thing jazzy-voiced Ray checks his selfishness/victim mentality. It’s good we don’t know about the wife’s background until the end so we can leave sympathizing with everybody more.
I like that the MCs verge paths sooner than most books would but not crazy soon and that the romantic relationship stuff isn’t dragged out. The meeting w/ his father brings up a lot of unique points and good tension, possibilities of what could happen. Maybe Icarus’s purpose was obvious but I didn’t catch on until it was spelled out. The dream at the end is beautiful, the reality not unrealistically sappy.
Icarus is another POV who thinks he’s beyond Earth so tried to kill himself so winds up in a psych ward, much like the soul-transporters in Craig’s piece Sunder from Filth. He’s blunt in the charming way of a southern black man (but maybe that’s the Audible narrator’s spin). He speaks of Mother Howl, what he personifies the universe as. “Silly String Theory,” medicine as “brain candy,” “I know you think I’m a foilhead who thinks Elvis shot Kennedy or something… PTA been after me for years” make me smile.
Lyle has so many coincidental run-ins with the law, I wouldn’t believe him as a cop either. He makes stupid decisions like getting involved between a petty criminal and Korean store owner. His good deed def comes off like he’s pals with the thief. If I was his wife, I’d get close to stabbing him over all his dumb decisions and how he doesn’t seem to love their baby besides keeping up a front or just to get his wife off his back. It shouldn’t take the threat of jail to wanna spend time w/ the kid. Good thing jazzy-voiced Ray checks his selfishness/victim mentality. It’s good we don’t know about the wife’s background until the end so we can leave sympathizing with everybody more.
I like that the MCs verge paths sooner than most books would but not crazy soon and that the romantic relationship stuff isn’t dragged out. The meeting w/ his father brings up a lot of unique points and good tension, possibilities of what could happen. Maybe Icarus’s purpose was obvious but I didn’t catch on until it was spelled out. The dream at the end is beautiful, the reality not unrealistically sappy.
July 11, 2023
Full Review Here
Mother Howl is Craig Clevenger’s first book since 2005 and appeared in excerpts throughout the years. While I can’t speak to if it was worth the wait tonight, I’ve not been aware of Clevenger that long, I can say that his work on it over the years paid off. This is a well-crafted piece of dark fiction about people carrying the scars of their past in a dark world determined to reopen them and infect them. It walks a line between dirty realism and horrific surrealism. It gives a sense of sick dread in one’s stomach, but keeps one wanting to turn the pages. Clevenger’s return to the novel form is a strong one.
Mother Howl is Craig Clevenger’s first book since 2005 and appeared in excerpts throughout the years. While I can’t speak to if it was worth the wait tonight, I’ve not been aware of Clevenger that long, I can say that his work on it over the years paid off. This is a well-crafted piece of dark fiction about people carrying the scars of their past in a dark world determined to reopen them and infect them. It walks a line between dirty realism and horrific surrealism. It gives a sense of sick dread in one’s stomach, but keeps one wanting to turn the pages. Clevenger’s return to the novel form is a strong one.
March 4, 2025
This isn't the book I thought it was.
It's much more of an existential journey towards assuming one's identity despite whatever fracture happened in the past than it is a novel about someone with a dark secret coming back to haunt him. It feels like a thriller, reads like one, but it never really kicks into gear because it isn't one. I wasn't a fan of the whole Icarus plot device thing as it really didn't portend to the rules that dictate Lyle Edison's universe. He exists to make things happen and it felt somewhat like cheating to me.
I would say this is half a a good novel and half of one that doesn't quite work. More on Dead End Follies later this week.
It's much more of an existential journey towards assuming one's identity despite whatever fracture happened in the past than it is a novel about someone with a dark secret coming back to haunt him. It feels like a thriller, reads like one, but it never really kicks into gear because it isn't one. I wasn't a fan of the whole Icarus plot device thing as it really didn't portend to the rules that dictate Lyle Edison's universe. He exists to make things happen and it felt somewhat like cheating to me.
I would say this is half a a good novel and half of one that doesn't quite work. More on Dead End Follies later this week.
July 31, 2023
Review originally published on JamReads
Mother Howl is a literary crime fiction, written by Craig Clevenger, and published by Datura Books. A story about dealing with the scars of the past, really centered around the characters and their respective traumas, following Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer, a man who is trying to flee from his past and avoid becoming somebody like his father.
Lyle was always Lyle, but when at his sixteen years-old, his father was revealed as a serial killer, all his life shattered; he fled from his house and illegally changed his name, looking to start from zero.Twenty years living under that new identity, he's currently on probation system for a crime he didn't commit, but is slowly building a life, having a wife, waiting for a baby; that's until a mysterious character, Icarus, literally descends from the sky.
Icarus is definitely an element that shakes us the whole novel ideal; no documentation, no way to identify him. He's convinced of hearing the voice of Mother Howl, an enigmatic figure that might represent something akin to God/its voice in this story. And when Icarus calls Lyle by his real name, that identity he tried to conceal from everybody, the foundations of Lyle's new life get shaken.
Lyle is a flawed character, essentially; he tried to leave her past behind when he paid to get the documentation that made his new identity possible, but he hadn't stopped looking behind with the fear somebody would discover him. His daughter and his wife are the reasons he needs to avoid getting into problems.
Mother Howl is a weird novel, in the sense we could classify it into different genres, such a noir thriller, but for moments it borders the magic realism. Pacing suffers a little due to this, being definitely slower than what I would have expected.
Said that, I think the weirdness is one of the details that makes the reading experience something memorable, complemented with a carefully crafted prose; you are definitely not prepared for what Clevenger proposes with Mother Howl.
Mother Howl is a literary crime fiction, written by Craig Clevenger, and published by Datura Books. A story about dealing with the scars of the past, really centered around the characters and their respective traumas, following Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer, a man who is trying to flee from his past and avoid becoming somebody like his father.
Lyle was always Lyle, but when at his sixteen years-old, his father was revealed as a serial killer, all his life shattered; he fled from his house and illegally changed his name, looking to start from zero.Twenty years living under that new identity, he's currently on probation system for a crime he didn't commit, but is slowly building a life, having a wife, waiting for a baby; that's until a mysterious character, Icarus, literally descends from the sky.
Icarus is definitely an element that shakes us the whole novel ideal; no documentation, no way to identify him. He's convinced of hearing the voice of Mother Howl, an enigmatic figure that might represent something akin to God/its voice in this story. And when Icarus calls Lyle by his real name, that identity he tried to conceal from everybody, the foundations of Lyle's new life get shaken.
Lyle is a flawed character, essentially; he tried to leave her past behind when he paid to get the documentation that made his new identity possible, but he hadn't stopped looking behind with the fear somebody would discover him. His daughter and his wife are the reasons he needs to avoid getting into problems.
Mother Howl is a weird novel, in the sense we could classify it into different genres, such a noir thriller, but for moments it borders the magic realism. Pacing suffers a little due to this, being definitely slower than what I would have expected.
Said that, I think the weirdness is one of the details that makes the reading experience something memorable, complemented with a carefully crafted prose; you are definitely not prepared for what Clevenger proposes with Mother Howl.
June 14, 2023
Never a dull day in the narrative style of brilliant noir master Craig Clevenger. Another easy 5 stars from me.
I pre-ordered this book when I found out Craig was
Writing it, having already had my guts wrenched out reading Dermaphoria and the contortionist’s handbook.
Some of my favorite quotes from mother howl:
“I heard ticking from the pocket of grandpa’s overalls and asked if he would show me his watch. “That’s not my watch”he said “that’s my mechanical heart.” He stroked my hair and looked down without a trace of a smile. “My heart kept breaking so I build a new one after I met your grandmother because I loved her so much I wanted a heart that would never break” I asked him if he would live forever. “It will rust someday” he said “the scrapyard awaits us all.””
🐺
“I didn’t need faith to believe in death. It was real enough and so it would come for Me”.
🐺
“His heart felt like it wouldn’t stop growing . He wanted to stand behind Sera and wrap his arms around her, one hand on her open breast and the other in his nursing daughter and feel their heartbeats and their breathing together, to bury his face in the warmth of Sera’s neck and hold them until his swelling heard enveloped them completely”.
🐺
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”-Nietzsche
🐺
The plot follows the son of a serial killer, who risks everything to do what he thinks will be “the right thing”. Terrorized by the trauma placed on him as a kid, and his treatment having had the same name as his serial killer father, Lester runs away from his god given name. Lester crafts an entirely new identity for himself, but haunted by his past, he can’t help but continue to test the system to see just how believable his fraudulent identity is, and if he has REALLY fully ghosted his previous identity. Following the appearance of Icarus, Lyle learns that there may be significantly more to gain by choosing the sort of resiliency it takes to accept who you are. A story about the sort of bravery it takes to choose authenticity, in all of its imperfect glory.
“‘What is it with you convicts and Nitzsche, anyway?’
‘I made you boy, and I been makin’ you every day of your life. You can’t run from your own blood’
‘And you can’t admit you’re the monster’
‘Think on this boy: your baby girl’s got your daddy’s blood. You going to disappear on her too? My grand daughter?’
‘Disappear? You mean like turning up on the news? Leaving my family to serve a triple life sentence?’
An electronic lock buzzer fee down the hallway and a pair of guards approached. One of them said to remain seated. Lyle didn’t know if they meant him, or his father, or both. He looked straight into the prisoners eyes one last time, she’s he’s not looked into since he was a teenager. Nothing looked back.”
“‘Twenty acres’ he said “Two-story house in the middle of nowhere. Probably collapsed, long ago by now. Ain’t mine anyway, never was. My father changed his will the day they arrested me, set up a trust to handle the taxes. Some lawyer name of March is all I know, but a smart guy Mike you should probably track him down, you wanted. Thing is, my old man willed it to his grandson. MY SON. He’s got the same name as me but with JUNIOR of course. So, Mr…. EDISON, you said your name was? Soon as my son steps up, proves who he is, admits he’s my flesh and blood, then it’s all his, whatever it’s worth. I figure that March fella’s probably been looking for my boy all this time. You ever inclined to track him down; pass that along about March and everything. Think you can do that?’
‘Yeah I can do that’
‘Tell him, tell my boy I want him to have it.’
‘Sure? Nothing else you want to say?’
‘Goodbye.
🐺
I have so many great things to say about this book I’m not sure how to pick just a handful.
🐺
The exhaustive nature of taxes, checks and balances, documentation and semantics humanity must furnish as proof of our existence and credibility remains a rich theme throughout the entirety of Mother Howl.
“Every time somebody runs my ID- landlords, employers, banks, the courts- I expect some agents in suits to appear and say ‘can you come with us?’ But they never do.” “Why would they?” “And I get the W-2 or the DMV registration, or whatever; that says Lyle Edison. And right then, I’ve escaped. I’m not his son anymore and nothing in the world feels better, nothing. So I keep testing it, doing stupid shit, proving to myself I escaped for good.”
🐺
I like the idea of Icarus being this strange sort of harbinger of serendipitous events that sport if being Lyle back to himself.
🐺
Love the Easter egg about the man who helped to create Lyle Edison… I’m lookin at you, contortionists handbook… IYKYK…
🐺
I love the idea that in real like, sometimes loose ends never get tied up, and sometimes there ARE no answers or explanations, and we don’t always find a definitive reason for our traumas because it’s realistic, and more horrifying in the implications of potential possibilities. The classic anti-ending allows you to fill in the blanks for yourself with what makes the most sense to you. Sometimes the beauty is in what’s implied without being written…
In the Tao de Ching, Lao-Tse says:
“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheels depends. We turn clay to make vessel, But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house,And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not”. And I think that’s the general energy Clevenger embraces with this ending.
“Heisenburg’s principle in action. Just by opening the drawer and looking in, you interfere with it’s behavior”.
BRAVO Craig Clevenger. Your work never ceases to amaze me. I’m so glad I ordered this on pre-order
I pre-ordered this book when I found out Craig was
Writing it, having already had my guts wrenched out reading Dermaphoria and the contortionist’s handbook.
Some of my favorite quotes from mother howl:
“I heard ticking from the pocket of grandpa’s overalls and asked if he would show me his watch. “That’s not my watch”he said “that’s my mechanical heart.” He stroked my hair and looked down without a trace of a smile. “My heart kept breaking so I build a new one after I met your grandmother because I loved her so much I wanted a heart that would never break” I asked him if he would live forever. “It will rust someday” he said “the scrapyard awaits us all.””
🐺
“I didn’t need faith to believe in death. It was real enough and so it would come for Me”.
🐺
“His heart felt like it wouldn’t stop growing . He wanted to stand behind Sera and wrap his arms around her, one hand on her open breast and the other in his nursing daughter and feel their heartbeats and their breathing together, to bury his face in the warmth of Sera’s neck and hold them until his swelling heard enveloped them completely”.
🐺
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”-Nietzsche
🐺
The plot follows the son of a serial killer, who risks everything to do what he thinks will be “the right thing”. Terrorized by the trauma placed on him as a kid, and his treatment having had the same name as his serial killer father, Lester runs away from his god given name. Lester crafts an entirely new identity for himself, but haunted by his past, he can’t help but continue to test the system to see just how believable his fraudulent identity is, and if he has REALLY fully ghosted his previous identity. Following the appearance of Icarus, Lyle learns that there may be significantly more to gain by choosing the sort of resiliency it takes to accept who you are. A story about the sort of bravery it takes to choose authenticity, in all of its imperfect glory.
“‘What is it with you convicts and Nitzsche, anyway?’
‘I made you boy, and I been makin’ you every day of your life. You can’t run from your own blood’
‘And you can’t admit you’re the monster’
‘Think on this boy: your baby girl’s got your daddy’s blood. You going to disappear on her too? My grand daughter?’
‘Disappear? You mean like turning up on the news? Leaving my family to serve a triple life sentence?’
An electronic lock buzzer fee down the hallway and a pair of guards approached. One of them said to remain seated. Lyle didn’t know if they meant him, or his father, or both. He looked straight into the prisoners eyes one last time, she’s he’s not looked into since he was a teenager. Nothing looked back.”
“‘Twenty acres’ he said “Two-story house in the middle of nowhere. Probably collapsed, long ago by now. Ain’t mine anyway, never was. My father changed his will the day they arrested me, set up a trust to handle the taxes. Some lawyer name of March is all I know, but a smart guy Mike you should probably track him down, you wanted. Thing is, my old man willed it to his grandson. MY SON. He’s got the same name as me but with JUNIOR of course. So, Mr…. EDISON, you said your name was? Soon as my son steps up, proves who he is, admits he’s my flesh and blood, then it’s all his, whatever it’s worth. I figure that March fella’s probably been looking for my boy all this time. You ever inclined to track him down; pass that along about March and everything. Think you can do that?’
‘Yeah I can do that’
‘Tell him, tell my boy I want him to have it.’
‘Sure? Nothing else you want to say?’
‘Goodbye.
🐺
I have so many great things to say about this book I’m not sure how to pick just a handful.
🐺
The exhaustive nature of taxes, checks and balances, documentation and semantics humanity must furnish as proof of our existence and credibility remains a rich theme throughout the entirety of Mother Howl.
“Every time somebody runs my ID- landlords, employers, banks, the courts- I expect some agents in suits to appear and say ‘can you come with us?’ But they never do.” “Why would they?” “And I get the W-2 or the DMV registration, or whatever; that says Lyle Edison. And right then, I’ve escaped. I’m not his son anymore and nothing in the world feels better, nothing. So I keep testing it, doing stupid shit, proving to myself I escaped for good.”
🐺
I like the idea of Icarus being this strange sort of harbinger of serendipitous events that sport if being Lyle back to himself.
🐺
Love the Easter egg about the man who helped to create Lyle Edison… I’m lookin at you, contortionists handbook… IYKYK…
🐺
I love the idea that in real like, sometimes loose ends never get tied up, and sometimes there ARE no answers or explanations, and we don’t always find a definitive reason for our traumas because it’s realistic, and more horrifying in the implications of potential possibilities. The classic anti-ending allows you to fill in the blanks for yourself with what makes the most sense to you. Sometimes the beauty is in what’s implied without being written…
In the Tao de Ching, Lao-Tse says:
“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheels depends. We turn clay to make vessel, But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house,And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not”. And I think that’s the general energy Clevenger embraces with this ending.
“Heisenburg’s principle in action. Just by opening the drawer and looking in, you interfere with it’s behavior”.
BRAVO Craig Clevenger. Your work never ceases to amaze me. I’m so glad I ordered this on pre-order
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 12, 2023
Lyle Edison is deeply troubled because he isn’t really Lyle Edison; Icarus is deeply untroubled because he thinks he really is Icarus, a sort of angel sent to Earth by “Mother Howl” on a mission. The Bible says that “In the beginning was the Word . . .and the Word was God” and, in his view, that is a sort of birth and mother’s don’t do that silently they howl! So Mother Howl is God.
Lyle has always been Lyle, but when he was sixteen his father was revealed to be a serial killer, whereupon Lyle’s life went down the tubes, constantly assaulted, ostracised at school, refused work opportunities. Being too young to apply for a legal change of identity he bought a new identity (a top-class forgery) and for twenty years he has lived in that identity. On probation for a crime he didn’t commit, his life is largely ruled by his probation officer (Note for UK readers, the system in the USA is much harsher). Nevertheless, he has a job, a new wife, and a baby. Then it all goes awry.
Icarus, living up to his name, arrives on Earth by falling naked out of the sky. Exhaustive investigations fail to identify him because he is not on any database; no social security number, no photographs on the web, no fingerprints, no trace of his DNA in the building adjacent to the pavement on which he landed. Subjected to antipsychotic drugs and therapy he looks like he might be losing touch with Mother Howl, so he disappears into the underworld of rough sleepers, and sets about finding his true mission – which might be saving Lyle.
The story unfolds from their separate points of view, and remains that way for most of its length with neither being aware of the other. Setting up the plot is complicated because both have complicated lives, and the major things causing their lives to be complicated are all aspects of the system: unfriendly, disorganised bureaucracy; automatically aggressive police; judiciary biased in favour of finding guilt; care in the community and mental health systems chaotic or non-existent. These factors drive the narrative and control the plot. If they are a true reflection of the system then I’m sorry for those trapped in it. Clevenger is a powerful writer, so the prose is excellent and decidedly unsettling. In terms of genre, it is safe to say that it doesn’t really conform to any. Parts of the Lyle story concern his father the serial Killer, but that doesn’t make it a crime story, murder/mystery or thriller. All of the Icarus story verges on magic-realism, but is it? Let’s call it speculative literature.
Lyle has always been Lyle, but when he was sixteen his father was revealed to be a serial killer, whereupon Lyle’s life went down the tubes, constantly assaulted, ostracised at school, refused work opportunities. Being too young to apply for a legal change of identity he bought a new identity (a top-class forgery) and for twenty years he has lived in that identity. On probation for a crime he didn’t commit, his life is largely ruled by his probation officer (Note for UK readers, the system in the USA is much harsher). Nevertheless, he has a job, a new wife, and a baby. Then it all goes awry.
Icarus, living up to his name, arrives on Earth by falling naked out of the sky. Exhaustive investigations fail to identify him because he is not on any database; no social security number, no photographs on the web, no fingerprints, no trace of his DNA in the building adjacent to the pavement on which he landed. Subjected to antipsychotic drugs and therapy he looks like he might be losing touch with Mother Howl, so he disappears into the underworld of rough sleepers, and sets about finding his true mission – which might be saving Lyle.
The story unfolds from their separate points of view, and remains that way for most of its length with neither being aware of the other. Setting up the plot is complicated because both have complicated lives, and the major things causing their lives to be complicated are all aspects of the system: unfriendly, disorganised bureaucracy; automatically aggressive police; judiciary biased in favour of finding guilt; care in the community and mental health systems chaotic or non-existent. These factors drive the narrative and control the plot. If they are a true reflection of the system then I’m sorry for those trapped in it. Clevenger is a powerful writer, so the prose is excellent and decidedly unsettling. In terms of genre, it is safe to say that it doesn’t really conform to any. Parts of the Lyle story concern his father the serial Killer, but that doesn’t make it a crime story, murder/mystery or thriller. All of the Icarus story verges on magic-realism, but is it? Let’s call it speculative literature.
September 9, 2023
A literary drama about the son of a famous serial killer -- he has his name changed, but decades later he may need to reclaim his birth name.
As a minor character, Icarus provides laugh-out-loud comic relief. I would love to read a novel where he is the main character.
As a minor character, Icarus provides laugh-out-loud comic relief. I would love to read a novel where he is the main character.
January 16, 2025
Wow. I’m still finding it difficult to describe with accuracy how good this book is. Things I enjoyed most: Well-drawn and other-worldly (literally) characters. Beautiful prose. Unconventional structure that flat out works so damn well.
Highly recommend this novel.
Highly recommend this novel.
July 6, 2023
Craig Clevenger is back and he’s written a killer book. It’s a dark story but it has moments of lightness and beauty too.
June 27, 2023
Sometime between 2004 and 2006, I fell in with a great group of friends who were deeply into fiction, and they were likely the biggest influence in me picking up books that were not simply fantasy titles. They all lauded Palahniuk’s work, but didn’t stop there, instead making big recommendations on authors I hadn’t heard of, likely because they weren’t Dan Brown or Kurt Vonnegut. One name that they brought up in such reverence was the author of this book: Craig Clevenger. I don’t know if I ended up reading Dermaphoria while I worked with them or some time after, but it left enough of an impact that I will always think of Clevenger as an author of note, even if only because I know that the name’s resonance will connect myself and this group of friends who remains close with me to this day. When this book was announced, I was excited of it, and had it listed as a google calender reminder, and what was so amazing… so true to the connective tissue of this group is that one of those friends reached out to me to remind me, apropos of nothing, that the book’s release date was coming up. I ended up receiving it as a gift for father’s day this year and blasted through it in a week.
One of the first things I noticed from this book is that it came across as way too edgy, coming in super fast with a darkness in the way that a table top role player thinks a tall mortician-type man would act in a noir film. In a lot of ways, the character Icarus reminds me of the narrator from Bastion. It’s a lot of smoke and whiskey and tough-linguist shit. I would say a good 60-70% of the first 100 pages are dedicated to Icarus’ search, and I kept wanting to return to Lyle’s story which was sparse and desperate. That being said, it was certainly a cliche “Life Is Hard” kind of story, but at least Lyle’s portion wasn’t narrated by what felt like a man in his early twenties wearing a fedora. I was eager to learn the purpose of Icarus’ visit, eager to learn more about what he was ‘sent’ to do. And, even in finishing the book, I still feel a bit unsatisfied in knowing the full arc of his journey. Throughout his sections of the book, a good chunk of the real estate is dialog, and a bigger part of that dialog is dripping [soaked in fact] with “Bad Ass Character Spiel” and as a person over 40… it becomes exhausting. Imagine a rivalry between two enemies in a shonen anime dragged out over 3 episodes without anything happening… this is how it feels to me.
The relationships, in fact, the people all kind of feel the same. They spit out their words, have histories that make them crippled to sensation. All of them seem nasty to one another, all but one man whose entire character description feels like he used to be in the same vein as the main cast, but he’s now gone sober so he’s given the sardonic bit a rest, instead happy enough to be the grandfather who’s become a softy in his older years. With Lyle (the main character) and his wife, there are times when you believe their love, believe their circumstance, and then there are times where the misery is just enough to not need to read about it. The balance is stricken perfectly, with their relationship cast on the table as just good enough for Lyle to not want to lose, but also just shitty enough to make it feel like Lyle is having a hard time with life. Every page feels like we’re puffing the exhaust of the vehicle of Lyle’s situation. Drawing portraits of the dogshit his life has become. At some point, I had to say to the book: “Okay. I get it.” The man simply has no existence that I believe in. His past drags him down, his present is clogged with a towering list of responsibilities, and his future is something that we barely can even strive for. I don’t understand his goals, I don’t understand his tomorrows. I don’t even know if he goes to work, I don’t know if he spends quality time with this family, I don’t know where his mind exists when he’s not patting himself on the back for loving the fact that The System doesn’t know his real name. At some point, I’m meant to feel some sympathy for the fact that he has a Parole Officer who is doing his job. Officer Reid is a character who holds a pretty big percentage of the story even if he doesn’t exist on the page at hand, he exists in terms of the limits to this character, and why Happiness and/or Prosperity doesn’t seem like a reality. It doesn’t seem like a possibility. A lot of the way this main character behaves is the way it feels to talk to someone who has recently been broken up with in a long-term relationship. The desperation is overwhelming, all-consuming… and as much as you try to help that person find relief or hope or a new day, they continue to generate quicksand that brings themselves down. Words are futile. Thoughts are futile.
Sadly, the characters are all flat. Exhaled of misery with nothing more to add. Not even an ember of ambition to scrape themselves to shore. They are all adrift in an impoverished world where everything is dark and windswept, cockroaches in every drawer. Every one of the people we meet has the vitality of a person in the line at the DMV. And within this, there isn’t the spark of humanity that an author like Cormac McCarthy is able to grant texture to. Instead, they feel like carbon copies of The System, carbon copies of “SoCiEtY”... it sadly kind of feels the way that adolescents view the world. People who would idolize The Riddler from the newest Batman movie. It feels victimizing. It feels hollow.
The book doesn’t seem to move until about halfway through, and when it did start to lurch into a direction, I didn’t realize it was until I looked backwards at it. There is a journey into a gulping depth, a matte darkness one of the main characters enters that you can sort of feel. I like how so much of that plummet is described in confusing and unsure ways. While I wish there was more descriptive ways Clevenger went about it, I’m a little torn about how I experienced it. On the one hand, I feel like I missed it as it was happening. It felt clunky, annoying, hesitant, hustled over. I couldn’t get my mind around it, couldn’t get my fingers wet with it. But on the other hand, I feel like that’s a pretty realistic way to go through what he’s going through. It’s how we would look back at a hurried descent. Our memories would make it worse. Our fears would amplify it. But the journey would always be this clumsy and rushed panoramic, stark and brief, forever longer in how we would talk about it than how we lived it. It was the first spark of thought or feeling I’d had over the [something like] 160 pages that preceded it.
Shortly after this physical descent, we get a chance to read a letter that is the most exciting part of the book, and then engage in an interaction that really continues to move the book in a direction towards some sort of conclusion. Things continue to happen rapidly after that, as we now have an endpoint that we’re working towards and a means with which to grasp it. And I think as the book begins to come upon an ending, I started to see things come together that started to make sense to me, an outcome that felt tangible and real… and then things got confusing again. I started to accept the outcomes of what they were saying as they were saying it and was ultimately ready to move on. And sadly, the one portion of the ending i was ready to accept ended up getting washed out anyway.
This book was disappointing to me in so many ways, especially considering how much I was looking forward to it! I wonder if my taste is changing or if it has something to do with being “older” and the fact that edgy and sardonic characters just don’t strike me the way that they would a college sophomore. I’m stoked that Clevenger wrote this and I’m happy he continues to create new works, but sadly I would not recommend this one, even to fans of his work. Please do take the time to read his other two though!!
One of the first things I noticed from this book is that it came across as way too edgy, coming in super fast with a darkness in the way that a table top role player thinks a tall mortician-type man would act in a noir film. In a lot of ways, the character Icarus reminds me of the narrator from Bastion. It’s a lot of smoke and whiskey and tough-linguist shit. I would say a good 60-70% of the first 100 pages are dedicated to Icarus’ search, and I kept wanting to return to Lyle’s story which was sparse and desperate. That being said, it was certainly a cliche “Life Is Hard” kind of story, but at least Lyle’s portion wasn’t narrated by what felt like a man in his early twenties wearing a fedora. I was eager to learn the purpose of Icarus’ visit, eager to learn more about what he was ‘sent’ to do. And, even in finishing the book, I still feel a bit unsatisfied in knowing the full arc of his journey. Throughout his sections of the book, a good chunk of the real estate is dialog, and a bigger part of that dialog is dripping [soaked in fact] with “Bad Ass Character Spiel” and as a person over 40… it becomes exhausting. Imagine a rivalry between two enemies in a shonen anime dragged out over 3 episodes without anything happening… this is how it feels to me.
The relationships, in fact, the people all kind of feel the same. They spit out their words, have histories that make them crippled to sensation. All of them seem nasty to one another, all but one man whose entire character description feels like he used to be in the same vein as the main cast, but he’s now gone sober so he’s given the sardonic bit a rest, instead happy enough to be the grandfather who’s become a softy in his older years. With Lyle (the main character) and his wife, there are times when you believe their love, believe their circumstance, and then there are times where the misery is just enough to not need to read about it. The balance is stricken perfectly, with their relationship cast on the table as just good enough for Lyle to not want to lose, but also just shitty enough to make it feel like Lyle is having a hard time with life. Every page feels like we’re puffing the exhaust of the vehicle of Lyle’s situation. Drawing portraits of the dogshit his life has become. At some point, I had to say to the book: “Okay. I get it.” The man simply has no existence that I believe in. His past drags him down, his present is clogged with a towering list of responsibilities, and his future is something that we barely can even strive for. I don’t understand his goals, I don’t understand his tomorrows. I don’t even know if he goes to work, I don’t know if he spends quality time with this family, I don’t know where his mind exists when he’s not patting himself on the back for loving the fact that The System doesn’t know his real name. At some point, I’m meant to feel some sympathy for the fact that he has a Parole Officer who is doing his job. Officer Reid is a character who holds a pretty big percentage of the story even if he doesn’t exist on the page at hand, he exists in terms of the limits to this character, and why Happiness and/or Prosperity doesn’t seem like a reality. It doesn’t seem like a possibility. A lot of the way this main character behaves is the way it feels to talk to someone who has recently been broken up with in a long-term relationship. The desperation is overwhelming, all-consuming… and as much as you try to help that person find relief or hope or a new day, they continue to generate quicksand that brings themselves down. Words are futile. Thoughts are futile.
Sadly, the characters are all flat. Exhaled of misery with nothing more to add. Not even an ember of ambition to scrape themselves to shore. They are all adrift in an impoverished world where everything is dark and windswept, cockroaches in every drawer. Every one of the people we meet has the vitality of a person in the line at the DMV. And within this, there isn’t the spark of humanity that an author like Cormac McCarthy is able to grant texture to. Instead, they feel like carbon copies of The System, carbon copies of “SoCiEtY”... it sadly kind of feels the way that adolescents view the world. People who would idolize The Riddler from the newest Batman movie. It feels victimizing. It feels hollow.
The book doesn’t seem to move until about halfway through, and when it did start to lurch into a direction, I didn’t realize it was until I looked backwards at it. There is a journey into a gulping depth, a matte darkness one of the main characters enters that you can sort of feel. I like how so much of that plummet is described in confusing and unsure ways. While I wish there was more descriptive ways Clevenger went about it, I’m a little torn about how I experienced it. On the one hand, I feel like I missed it as it was happening. It felt clunky, annoying, hesitant, hustled over. I couldn’t get my mind around it, couldn’t get my fingers wet with it. But on the other hand, I feel like that’s a pretty realistic way to go through what he’s going through. It’s how we would look back at a hurried descent. Our memories would make it worse. Our fears would amplify it. But the journey would always be this clumsy and rushed panoramic, stark and brief, forever longer in how we would talk about it than how we lived it. It was the first spark of thought or feeling I’d had over the [something like] 160 pages that preceded it.
Shortly after this physical descent, we get a chance to read a letter that is the most exciting part of the book, and then engage in an interaction that really continues to move the book in a direction towards some sort of conclusion. Things continue to happen rapidly after that, as we now have an endpoint that we’re working towards and a means with which to grasp it. And I think as the book begins to come upon an ending, I started to see things come together that started to make sense to me, an outcome that felt tangible and real… and then things got confusing again. I started to accept the outcomes of what they were saying as they were saying it and was ultimately ready to move on. And sadly, the one portion of the ending i was ready to accept ended up getting washed out anyway.
This book was disappointing to me in so many ways, especially considering how much I was looking forward to it! I wonder if my taste is changing or if it has something to do with being “older” and the fact that edgy and sardonic characters just don’t strike me the way that they would a college sophomore. I’m stoked that Clevenger wrote this and I’m happy he continues to create new works, but sadly I would not recommend this one, even to fans of his work. Please do take the time to read his other two though!!
July 23, 2023
I liked it,it’s intriguing but I ave to gorok it before writing a review
Many thanks to the publisher, all opinions are mine
Many thanks to the publisher, all opinions are mine
October 20, 2023
All my reviews can be found at damppebbles.com
Lyle Edison is a young man with a past. A past he’s desperate to escape from. Lyle’s father is a convicted serial killer and the burden of carrying that through his life, of people knowing what Lyle’s father did and associating him with his father’s despicable acts, weighs heavy on Lyle’s shoulders. So Lyle illegally changes his name, believing that will banish the past and enable him to live his life. But what Lyle doesn’t account for is the guilt of committing a crime along with the knowledge that at any point, he could be caught. Particularly when a strange man called Icarus, who claims to be not of this earth and receiving messages from a god-like entity called Mother Howl, seems to know everything about Lyle. Lyle needs to decide whether to confront his own past or risk destroying everything he holds dear…
Mother Howl is a slow burn, character-driven, literary crime novel about a young man who desperately wants to escape the trauma of his past. Lyle is a good man but turns to a criminal for help to rewrite history in the form of a brand new identity and accompanying paperwork. With his new found persona, Lyle moves away to a town where no one knows who he is and starts to build a new, untarnished life. I felt desperately sorry for Lyle who has an innocence to him that I became quite fond of. I wanted him to be free of the burdens of his past. I wanted him to start a new life with his new name and new wife that would be fulfilling and without repercussions. But of course, nothing is ever that easy and things take an unexpected turn for our lead protagonist in the form of Icarus. The introduction of this strange, otherworldly being really does blur the genre lines of this novel. Is it magical realism? Perhaps urban fantasy is a more fitting label? (Not that I read any urban fantasy so what do I know? Not a lot!) The reader is introduced to Icarus early on in the novel but you never really get a strong hold on who, or what, he is. And I’ll be completely honest with you, Icarus hurt my head a little. He’s frantic and jumbled and wordy and impossible to explain. The story is told from both Lyle’s point of view and Icarus’s. But the two don’t meet until much later in the book. I was 100% there for Lyle’s chapters. I wasn’t so keen about Icarus’s.
Would I recommend this book? If you’re looking for something to get your teeth into, something a bit different with a slightly slower pace and an interesting lead then yes, I would recommend Mother Howl. Parts of this novel really worked for me. Others, not so much. But the overall package is good and Lyle’s story is interesting. Also, if you enjoy books that blur the lines between genres then you should pick this one up as, despite me not being 100% sold on Icarus, I do think the gradual merging of the two storylines worked well. An interesting read which I’m glad I took a chance on.
Lyle Edison is a young man with a past. A past he’s desperate to escape from. Lyle’s father is a convicted serial killer and the burden of carrying that through his life, of people knowing what Lyle’s father did and associating him with his father’s despicable acts, weighs heavy on Lyle’s shoulders. So Lyle illegally changes his name, believing that will banish the past and enable him to live his life. But what Lyle doesn’t account for is the guilt of committing a crime along with the knowledge that at any point, he could be caught. Particularly when a strange man called Icarus, who claims to be not of this earth and receiving messages from a god-like entity called Mother Howl, seems to know everything about Lyle. Lyle needs to decide whether to confront his own past or risk destroying everything he holds dear…
Mother Howl is a slow burn, character-driven, literary crime novel about a young man who desperately wants to escape the trauma of his past. Lyle is a good man but turns to a criminal for help to rewrite history in the form of a brand new identity and accompanying paperwork. With his new found persona, Lyle moves away to a town where no one knows who he is and starts to build a new, untarnished life. I felt desperately sorry for Lyle who has an innocence to him that I became quite fond of. I wanted him to be free of the burdens of his past. I wanted him to start a new life with his new name and new wife that would be fulfilling and without repercussions. But of course, nothing is ever that easy and things take an unexpected turn for our lead protagonist in the form of Icarus. The introduction of this strange, otherworldly being really does blur the genre lines of this novel. Is it magical realism? Perhaps urban fantasy is a more fitting label? (Not that I read any urban fantasy so what do I know? Not a lot!) The reader is introduced to Icarus early on in the novel but you never really get a strong hold on who, or what, he is. And I’ll be completely honest with you, Icarus hurt my head a little. He’s frantic and jumbled and wordy and impossible to explain. The story is told from both Lyle’s point of view and Icarus’s. But the two don’t meet until much later in the book. I was 100% there for Lyle’s chapters. I wasn’t so keen about Icarus’s.
Would I recommend this book? If you’re looking for something to get your teeth into, something a bit different with a slightly slower pace and an interesting lead then yes, I would recommend Mother Howl. Parts of this novel really worked for me. Others, not so much. But the overall package is good and Lyle’s story is interesting. Also, if you enjoy books that blur the lines between genres then you should pick this one up as, despite me not being 100% sold on Icarus, I do think the gradual merging of the two storylines worked well. An interesting read which I’m glad I took a chance on.
July 4, 2023
During the embryonic years of this century, two novels by one novelist blew through the doors of neo-noir and transgressive fiction and forced us to rethink exactly what those genres could offer; what they were capable of doing to the mind of the reader – to the places the reader could be transported to; to the turning, churning, emotions they could feel.
Those novels were The Contortionist’s Handbook (2002) and Dermaphoria (2005).
That novelist was Craig Clevenger.
Now, some 18-years later after his second novel, a hiatus triggered by all the upheaval which comes with a publisher going belly-up and the Ground Zero that can leave behind, Clevenger is back with his third novel, Mother Howl, which not only blows through those same doors, but blows through the door of Genre itself… then grips that door between concrete hands, rips it off its hinges and smashes it to pieces… which seems apt, given the jaw-dropping dénouement of his latest masterpiece which deftly combines both gritty and magical realism.
Akin to how Hunter S. Thompson repeatedly typed out pages of The Great Gatsby to learn the rhythms of great writing, I reread The Contortionist’s Handbook biennially, if not yearly, so I could hardly contain my excitement when I learnt that Mother Howl was due to be released… and on my birthday, no less.
Stars aligning, and all that.
It doesn’t disappoint.
In fact, it blew my mind.
Throughout the reading of it, I fluctuated between muttering, through a huge smile, 'This is too fkn good', and clapping a hand to my grinless face in horror, panic and absolute despair.
Despite the clear similarities between his first two novels (the droll, often laugh-out-loud killer dialogue which carves out its own dialectical register; the machine-gun imagery; the jazzy syntactical rhythms), there was always something almost chameleonic about Clevenger’s writing.
The collapsing, counterfeit world of John Dolan Vincent (in The Contortionist’s Handbook) is a far-cry from the drug-addled, kaleidoscopic nightmare of Eric Ashworth in Dermaphoria. And this stylistic shapeshifting has never been more obvious than in Mother Howl, yet the novel retains the unmistakable fingerprints of the author.
Clevenger’s continuing interest in the fragility and mutability of identity is still ever present, but in his exploration of inherited damage, this is extrapolated to the Nth degree: a nature/nurture debate par excellence.
The split narratives of Lyle, the son of a serial killer who has gone to extreme measures to distance himself from his father; and Icarus, the eloquent yet enigmatic vagrant (who may or may not be The {Angel} Who Fell to Earth) are expertly handled, keeping you forever guessing; never making you impatient; and when they eventually reach eclipse, they rip your heart out.
Then after Third Contact, those same split-narratives replace your heart, rip it out again and tap-dance all over that poor, pathetic excuse for a ticker.
And the last act? Holy Moly – it was so tense I had to stop myself from skipping forward a few pages to see how things played out by putting the book down and making a cup of tea; walking around the room; letting the dog out.
I can’t remember the last time I had such a physically visceral response to a book – perhaps reading the author’s forename-namesake, Craig Barker, way back in my teens.
It seems moot to comment upon how blistering the dialogue is, here, because this is Craig Clevenger we’re talking about – but in Mother Howl, Clevenger out-Clevengers himself. It is so razor-sharp it cuts your mind through the reading of it – but also, in Icarus, the experimentation with language is an utter joy to behold – a Falstaff or Dogberry or Malvolio of the 21st Century.
Perhaps this laser-precise, consistent dialogue is not so surprising given what I learnt relatively recently about Clevenger’s writing process – that he writes all the dialogue after writing the prose, leaving markers where the dialogue should go. But reading Mother Howl, where whole chapters are almost entirely made up of direct speech, that just blows my mind all the more – to have that level of control and vision, which pays off in spades. He continues to be one of the greatest writers of dialogue ever to commit it to the page.
That also goes for his ability to create incredible character names… Twenty Long? Fish Stick anyone? Dickens is high-fiving from beyond the grave.
Beyond the inventive, memorable nomenclature, all the characters are so precisely, vividly, tenderly drawn. In Reid, Clevenger has created one of the most formidable, despicable antagonists you’ll ever come across: the man you’ll love to hate… and hate to love.
And that’s even before The Prisoner rocks up…
But I also think that the author continues to exhibit, what I would call, an ethical responsibility regarding his themes and characters – across his works, whether writing about drug abuse, brain injury, mental health, violence, homelessness, Clevenger never writes in a sensationalist, pejorative or clichéd register, always paying honour and respect to his subject matter and its subjects. And this respect, honesty and, ultimately, tenderness and love is tangible and palpable and never fails to make you catch your breath with this sentence here; that image there; a line of dialogue whispered in your ear.
As I read the last page, the total killer of a last line which raised all the fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck (which brought tears to my eyes) I was reminded of Raymond Carver’s closing paragraph of his foreword to his collection of short stories, Where I’m Calling From. Granted, Carver’s talking about the short form, but it’s equally applicable to any work of fiction… and none more so than that moment, today, when I finished Mother Howl:
“If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves”, as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life”.
I’ve waited 18 years for this.
And it was well worth the wait.
Craig Clevenger’s back, thank God.
And I have a feeling it won’t be too long until he’s back once more.
Those novels were The Contortionist’s Handbook (2002) and Dermaphoria (2005).
That novelist was Craig Clevenger.
Now, some 18-years later after his second novel, a hiatus triggered by all the upheaval which comes with a publisher going belly-up and the Ground Zero that can leave behind, Clevenger is back with his third novel, Mother Howl, which not only blows through those same doors, but blows through the door of Genre itself… then grips that door between concrete hands, rips it off its hinges and smashes it to pieces… which seems apt, given the jaw-dropping dénouement of his latest masterpiece which deftly combines both gritty and magical realism.
Akin to how Hunter S. Thompson repeatedly typed out pages of The Great Gatsby to learn the rhythms of great writing, I reread The Contortionist’s Handbook biennially, if not yearly, so I could hardly contain my excitement when I learnt that Mother Howl was due to be released… and on my birthday, no less.
Stars aligning, and all that.
It doesn’t disappoint.
In fact, it blew my mind.
Throughout the reading of it, I fluctuated between muttering, through a huge smile, 'This is too fkn good', and clapping a hand to my grinless face in horror, panic and absolute despair.
Despite the clear similarities between his first two novels (the droll, often laugh-out-loud killer dialogue which carves out its own dialectical register; the machine-gun imagery; the jazzy syntactical rhythms), there was always something almost chameleonic about Clevenger’s writing.
The collapsing, counterfeit world of John Dolan Vincent (in The Contortionist’s Handbook) is a far-cry from the drug-addled, kaleidoscopic nightmare of Eric Ashworth in Dermaphoria. And this stylistic shapeshifting has never been more obvious than in Mother Howl, yet the novel retains the unmistakable fingerprints of the author.
Clevenger’s continuing interest in the fragility and mutability of identity is still ever present, but in his exploration of inherited damage, this is extrapolated to the Nth degree: a nature/nurture debate par excellence.
The split narratives of Lyle, the son of a serial killer who has gone to extreme measures to distance himself from his father; and Icarus, the eloquent yet enigmatic vagrant (who may or may not be The {Angel} Who Fell to Earth) are expertly handled, keeping you forever guessing; never making you impatient; and when they eventually reach eclipse, they rip your heart out.
Then after Third Contact, those same split-narratives replace your heart, rip it out again and tap-dance all over that poor, pathetic excuse for a ticker.
And the last act? Holy Moly – it was so tense I had to stop myself from skipping forward a few pages to see how things played out by putting the book down and making a cup of tea; walking around the room; letting the dog out.
I can’t remember the last time I had such a physically visceral response to a book – perhaps reading the author’s forename-namesake, Craig Barker, way back in my teens.
It seems moot to comment upon how blistering the dialogue is, here, because this is Craig Clevenger we’re talking about – but in Mother Howl, Clevenger out-Clevengers himself. It is so razor-sharp it cuts your mind through the reading of it – but also, in Icarus, the experimentation with language is an utter joy to behold – a Falstaff or Dogberry or Malvolio of the 21st Century.
Perhaps this laser-precise, consistent dialogue is not so surprising given what I learnt relatively recently about Clevenger’s writing process – that he writes all the dialogue after writing the prose, leaving markers where the dialogue should go. But reading Mother Howl, where whole chapters are almost entirely made up of direct speech, that just blows my mind all the more – to have that level of control and vision, which pays off in spades. He continues to be one of the greatest writers of dialogue ever to commit it to the page.
That also goes for his ability to create incredible character names… Twenty Long? Fish Stick anyone? Dickens is high-fiving from beyond the grave.
Beyond the inventive, memorable nomenclature, all the characters are so precisely, vividly, tenderly drawn. In Reid, Clevenger has created one of the most formidable, despicable antagonists you’ll ever come across: the man you’ll love to hate… and hate to love.
And that’s even before The Prisoner rocks up…
But I also think that the author continues to exhibit, what I would call, an ethical responsibility regarding his themes and characters – across his works, whether writing about drug abuse, brain injury, mental health, violence, homelessness, Clevenger never writes in a sensationalist, pejorative or clichéd register, always paying honour and respect to his subject matter and its subjects. And this respect, honesty and, ultimately, tenderness and love is tangible and palpable and never fails to make you catch your breath with this sentence here; that image there; a line of dialogue whispered in your ear.
As I read the last page, the total killer of a last line which raised all the fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck (which brought tears to my eyes) I was reminded of Raymond Carver’s closing paragraph of his foreword to his collection of short stories, Where I’m Calling From. Granted, Carver’s talking about the short form, but it’s equally applicable to any work of fiction… and none more so than that moment, today, when I finished Mother Howl:
“If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves”, as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life”.
I’ve waited 18 years for this.
And it was well worth the wait.
Craig Clevenger’s back, thank God.
And I have a feeling it won’t be too long until he’s back once more.
October 19, 2023
It took me a long time to get into this story. In fact, I tried it months earlier and gave up, so tried again. I got a little further this time, but it wasn't for me. I ended up skipping through it.
It was billed as a literary crime thriller and, to start with, I was engaged with the story of one of the main characters, the young boy, Lyle, whose father turns out to be a serial killer. Following Lyle's progress in dealing with this terrible inheritance was fascinating until it came to the other character of Icarus, which the story seemed to dwell on to the detriment of the converging Lyle storyline. I could not work out if this second character was an alien from another planet or mentally ill. I think the problem, for me, was that it took too long time for the two parallel lives to come together to get to any point. The narrative felt disjointed and the interaction in their storylines took too long to materialise.
The Lyle storyline was compelling but the intellectual postering of Icarus less so. Well-written but, to me, baffling. Sorry.
Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy of this book.
It was billed as a literary crime thriller and, to start with, I was engaged with the story of one of the main characters, the young boy, Lyle, whose father turns out to be a serial killer. Following Lyle's progress in dealing with this terrible inheritance was fascinating until it came to the other character of Icarus, which the story seemed to dwell on to the detriment of the converging Lyle storyline. I could not work out if this second character was an alien from another planet or mentally ill. I think the problem, for me, was that it took too long time for the two parallel lives to come together to get to any point. The narrative felt disjointed and the interaction in their storylines took too long to materialise.
The Lyle storyline was compelling but the intellectual postering of Icarus less so. Well-written but, to me, baffling. Sorry.
Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy of this book.
July 3, 2023
Lyle’s dad turns out to be a serial killer and the revelation unsurprisingly transforms his life. After enduring all the beatings and horrors of being a social pariah, he leaves home before graduating high school, gets a fake identity and starts fresh in a new town. Years later, Lyle’s married with a newborn and encounters Icarus, a seemingly crazy homeless man who claims to be an immortal celestial - and who knows who Lyle really is.
Craig Clevenger’s Mother Howl is a well-written, accessible, and occasionally entertaining novel that didn’t quite do it for me partly because I found the narrative meandering and largely pointless, and partly because the main character’s decisions were so bafflingly stupid and contrived that there wouldn’t be a novel without him behaving the way he did.
Lyle Edison is a man who makes more bad decisions than the CEO of OceanGate. Let’s start with the premise: Lyle’s a year shy of graduating high school, meaning he could officially change his name in a year. But life is just too intolerable for him, so he goes through backchannels and gets a new identity illegally now. I don’t know how legal matters work in the US but, considering the massive problems his fake identity causes him down the line, wouldn’t he be better off just adopting the fake identity for a year only and THEN changing it legally as his birth name/identity? Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he could.
Lyle is also unnecessarily reckless towards law enforcement. He’s already on probation for a weird drugs charge but he also goes out of his way to be antagonistic towards them whenever he crosses paths with them, which happens frequently. It is addressed in the novel, and might be explained as part of his damaged psyche, or something. He also jeopardises his marriage for no reason by not telling his wife things about his night forays, even though they’re benign so he could’ve just straight up told her and put her mind at rest.
Icarus’ chapters were my least favourite in the novel. They’re very… stylised, perhaps to reflect his chaotic state of mind. We’re not really sure whether he is the celestial being (or whatever) he says he is, or whether he’s simply mentally ill - the latter seems likely, but he does find out Lyle’s name and get ahold of Lyle’s granddad’s letter, neither of which are explained, so maybe he is supernatural. But so what if he is; what are we meant to take away from such a revelation - homeless people are magic?
Icarus is a well-written character but his inclusion felt more like a contrivance than anything else. Him knowing Lyle’s real name doesn’t go anywhere - he’s not going to tell anyone or do anything, so there’s no stakes. So what’s the point? Don’t know. He struggles with civil service bureaucracy, like Lyle, and identity plays a big role for both characters, so he’s there to further underline the failings of the system for the little guy and the theme of identity in the modern world. But take him away and you still have those things - the only crucial part he plays is in handing over the granddad’s letter, which, if Clevenger had decided to write out Icarus’ character entirely, Lyle could’ve probably gotten another way easily.
I loved the sheer unpleasantness of Lyle’s probation officer Nestor Reid - he is such an unrepentant shitbag that all of his scenes with Lyle were absolutely riveting. The opening chapters where Lyle’s family life is disrupted and then falls apart, leading to his fleeing everything, was brilliantly told as well. The novel portrays the frustrations of dealing with civil servants accurately and tangibly. Clevenger is a fine writer, he just lacks focus as a storyteller, as most of the novel was much less interesting.
I’m not sure what we’re meant to take from the story besides the little guy suffers from the bureaucracies of the civil service or some trite sentiment like “the past ain’t done with you”, which aren’t exactly startling truths. We can’t escape our true selves whatever name we call ourselves? Eh. There IS a god? Er… On face value, the story is an unsatisfying and rambling one with few moments throughout to make the experience of reading it worthwhile. Maybe Craig Clevenger’s other novels are better but I found Mother Howl to be howlingly dull more often than not, unimpressive and ultimately quite forgettable.
Craig Clevenger’s Mother Howl is a well-written, accessible, and occasionally entertaining novel that didn’t quite do it for me partly because I found the narrative meandering and largely pointless, and partly because the main character’s decisions were so bafflingly stupid and contrived that there wouldn’t be a novel without him behaving the way he did.
Lyle Edison is a man who makes more bad decisions than the CEO of OceanGate. Let’s start with the premise: Lyle’s a year shy of graduating high school, meaning he could officially change his name in a year. But life is just too intolerable for him, so he goes through backchannels and gets a new identity illegally now. I don’t know how legal matters work in the US but, considering the massive problems his fake identity causes him down the line, wouldn’t he be better off just adopting the fake identity for a year only and THEN changing it legally as his birth name/identity? Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he could.
Lyle is also unnecessarily reckless towards law enforcement. He’s already on probation for a weird drugs charge but he also goes out of his way to be antagonistic towards them whenever he crosses paths with them, which happens frequently. It is addressed in the novel, and might be explained as part of his damaged psyche, or something. He also jeopardises his marriage for no reason by not telling his wife things about his night forays, even though they’re benign so he could’ve just straight up told her and put her mind at rest.
Icarus’ chapters were my least favourite in the novel. They’re very… stylised, perhaps to reflect his chaotic state of mind. We’re not really sure whether he is the celestial being (or whatever) he says he is, or whether he’s simply mentally ill - the latter seems likely, but he does find out Lyle’s name and get ahold of Lyle’s granddad’s letter, neither of which are explained, so maybe he is supernatural. But so what if he is; what are we meant to take away from such a revelation - homeless people are magic?
Icarus is a well-written character but his inclusion felt more like a contrivance than anything else. Him knowing Lyle’s real name doesn’t go anywhere - he’s not going to tell anyone or do anything, so there’s no stakes. So what’s the point? Don’t know. He struggles with civil service bureaucracy, like Lyle, and identity plays a big role for both characters, so he’s there to further underline the failings of the system for the little guy and the theme of identity in the modern world. But take him away and you still have those things - the only crucial part he plays is in handing over the granddad’s letter, which, if Clevenger had decided to write out Icarus’ character entirely, Lyle could’ve probably gotten another way easily.
I loved the sheer unpleasantness of Lyle’s probation officer Nestor Reid - he is such an unrepentant shitbag that all of his scenes with Lyle were absolutely riveting. The opening chapters where Lyle’s family life is disrupted and then falls apart, leading to his fleeing everything, was brilliantly told as well. The novel portrays the frustrations of dealing with civil servants accurately and tangibly. Clevenger is a fine writer, he just lacks focus as a storyteller, as most of the novel was much less interesting.
I’m not sure what we’re meant to take from the story besides the little guy suffers from the bureaucracies of the civil service or some trite sentiment like “the past ain’t done with you”, which aren’t exactly startling truths. We can’t escape our true selves whatever name we call ourselves? Eh. There IS a god? Er… On face value, the story is an unsatisfying and rambling one with few moments throughout to make the experience of reading it worthwhile. Maybe Craig Clevenger’s other novels are better but I found Mother Howl to be howlingly dull more often than not, unimpressive and ultimately quite forgettable.
July 10, 2023
Lydia Lunch Interviews Craig Clevenger (7-7-23)
https://lydianspin.libsyn.com/episode...
WORTH THE WAIT: TALKING WITH MOTHER HOWL’S CRAIG CLEVENGER (6-12-23)
https://crimereads.com/craig-clevenge...
https://lydianspin.libsyn.com/episode...
WORTH THE WAIT: TALKING WITH MOTHER HOWL’S CRAIG CLEVENGER (6-12-23)
https://crimereads.com/craig-clevenge...
July 22, 2023
Ended up just kind of skim-speed-reading my way through the rest of this. Not bad and well-written but not for me. Too unsatisfying an end for my taste.
June 8, 2023
Down the rabbit hole…
‘In the beginning there was the Word. More like a scream. Or a howl.’ What the heck did I just read? OH my!!
Lyle suffers when his father turns out to be a murderer. From then on, it’s down the rabbit hole for him… To escape everything, Lyle takes to the streets at 17, burning everything that reminds him of the past. He adopts an alias - and is called Lyle Edison from then on. Soon after we meet Icarus.
I first thought that I was transported to the closed ward of Twelve Monkeys (film), also there were hints to Vertigo (Hitchcock) - but I suspect Icarus is Lyle's alter ego in an altered state of a full-blown mania. The writing style in the novel therefore changes, and as a reader you find yourself in a jumble where reality and delusion alternate. I found it fascinating honestly, and didn't mind reading it very much. I'm not an MD, so my diagnosis may not make sense at all, but because it tells of 'brain candy', 'old brain, new brain', and taking a salt to keep the highs and the lows under control, which is, I assume, lithium, so my guess is that Lyle/Icarus is bipolar or schizophrenic(?)..
Icarus is ‘tuned’ to everything that talks and transmits, and it seems like a kind of dream state that Icarus has fallen into, seeing himself as someone who is "Tuned" – with TV’s talking, and transmitting, he hears voices and seems to be having auditory hallucinations nonstop, disorganised thoughts, experiencing illogical inferences, with vivid imaginations/hallucinations – (I guess I belong to the ‘Untuned’, yet I thought I was in wonderland myself, with an amazing sense of fluidity.)
Like said, at times I had no idea what I was reading, but allowed myself to be carried away on the cadence of absurdism, the abundant use of figurative language and of disorganised and associative thinking. I have regularly written down beautiful sentences, just to keep. ‘The Untuned, the ignorant, the abandoned, and the forgotten. All had part in the Mother Howl’s infinite machine, and ‘bubble gum music, recorded in a sound proof bunker and tested on veterans and rabid mice.’[..]
Icarus – after his fall from ‘heaven’, (attempt to fly) has since been admitted and the lithium is helping him regain some sanity.
The story then takes another leap, Lyle has met a woman and gets into a serious relationship with her. They even have a baby together. Lyle, meanwhile, is trying to find a job, but 'seems to have fallen from heaven', he simple doesn’t exist within the System: he has not ID, no security number, which puts him out of work everywhere. Despite many frantic attempts - like a Sisyphus labour - much turns out to fail. The sections on the homeless, the soup kitchens, the 'invisibles’ (homeless) are a raw and gripping account of the people who live on the fringe of America. It rings of echoes of loss, and ‘emptiness of memories.’
Lyle/Icarus’ struggle with his personal demons and his struggle to get back in – as with every step he tries to take in the right direction, he hurdles down again. Another attempt. Old Brain. New Brain. Blue pill. Red Pill. Shower. Blanket. Screen test. Blue Man (police). Shower. Soup. More pills. And back to the streets again. I felt his desperation and suffered with him. Oh, Lyle, what a life…
I had to put my Kindle down regularly because of the plethora of the emotions dripping from the pages; what an extraordinary and intense story, with emotions ranging from anger to despair. And everything in-between. Nothing I have ever read before.
I found Lyle’s fight for respect as a human being and his right to just ‘be’ particularly poignant and raw and directly told. A gripping, raw, and rather confrontational prose, in which the author shows you an America you would rather stay away from. The first few chapters reminded me of Carson McCullers’s writing style – and the book, to me, has a distinctly Southern Gothic vibe to it.
I had a totally different idea of the book – but this turned out to be an unexpected gem. I don’t think the story will appeal to everyone, but if you let yourself be carried away on spectacular creative use of language and images, magical - and disorganised thinking, you are in for a treat here!
I was blown away by it, and it will linger for a long time. Gobsmacked, to be precise, as we say in this part of the world. 😊
5 stars. Thank you Netgalley and Datura Books for this wonderful read.
** Publication date: June 13, 2023 **
‘In the beginning there was the Word. More like a scream. Or a howl.’ What the heck did I just read? OH my!!
Lyle suffers when his father turns out to be a murderer. From then on, it’s down the rabbit hole for him… To escape everything, Lyle takes to the streets at 17, burning everything that reminds him of the past. He adopts an alias - and is called Lyle Edison from then on. Soon after we meet Icarus.
I first thought that I was transported to the closed ward of Twelve Monkeys (film), also there were hints to Vertigo (Hitchcock) - but I suspect Icarus is Lyle's alter ego in an altered state of a full-blown mania. The writing style in the novel therefore changes, and as a reader you find yourself in a jumble where reality and delusion alternate. I found it fascinating honestly, and didn't mind reading it very much. I'm not an MD, so my diagnosis may not make sense at all, but because it tells of 'brain candy', 'old brain, new brain', and taking a salt to keep the highs and the lows under control, which is, I assume, lithium, so my guess is that Lyle/Icarus is bipolar or schizophrenic(?)..
Icarus is ‘tuned’ to everything that talks and transmits, and it seems like a kind of dream state that Icarus has fallen into, seeing himself as someone who is "Tuned" – with TV’s talking, and transmitting, he hears voices and seems to be having auditory hallucinations nonstop, disorganised thoughts, experiencing illogical inferences, with vivid imaginations/hallucinations – (I guess I belong to the ‘Untuned’, yet I thought I was in wonderland myself, with an amazing sense of fluidity.)
Like said, at times I had no idea what I was reading, but allowed myself to be carried away on the cadence of absurdism, the abundant use of figurative language and of disorganised and associative thinking. I have regularly written down beautiful sentences, just to keep. ‘The Untuned, the ignorant, the abandoned, and the forgotten. All had part in the Mother Howl’s infinite machine, and ‘bubble gum music, recorded in a sound proof bunker and tested on veterans and rabid mice.’[..]
Icarus – after his fall from ‘heaven’, (attempt to fly) has since been admitted and the lithium is helping him regain some sanity.
The story then takes another leap, Lyle has met a woman and gets into a serious relationship with her. They even have a baby together. Lyle, meanwhile, is trying to find a job, but 'seems to have fallen from heaven', he simple doesn’t exist within the System: he has not ID, no security number, which puts him out of work everywhere. Despite many frantic attempts - like a Sisyphus labour - much turns out to fail. The sections on the homeless, the soup kitchens, the 'invisibles’ (homeless) are a raw and gripping account of the people who live on the fringe of America. It rings of echoes of loss, and ‘emptiness of memories.’
Lyle/Icarus’ struggle with his personal demons and his struggle to get back in – as with every step he tries to take in the right direction, he hurdles down again. Another attempt. Old Brain. New Brain. Blue pill. Red Pill. Shower. Blanket. Screen test. Blue Man (police). Shower. Soup. More pills. And back to the streets again. I felt his desperation and suffered with him. Oh, Lyle, what a life…
I had to put my Kindle down regularly because of the plethora of the emotions dripping from the pages; what an extraordinary and intense story, with emotions ranging from anger to despair. And everything in-between. Nothing I have ever read before.
I found Lyle’s fight for respect as a human being and his right to just ‘be’ particularly poignant and raw and directly told. A gripping, raw, and rather confrontational prose, in which the author shows you an America you would rather stay away from. The first few chapters reminded me of Carson McCullers’s writing style – and the book, to me, has a distinctly Southern Gothic vibe to it.
I had a totally different idea of the book – but this turned out to be an unexpected gem. I don’t think the story will appeal to everyone, but if you let yourself be carried away on spectacular creative use of language and images, magical - and disorganised thinking, you are in for a treat here!
I was blown away by it, and it will linger for a long time. Gobsmacked, to be precise, as we say in this part of the world. 😊
5 stars. Thank you Netgalley and Datura Books for this wonderful read.
** Publication date: June 13, 2023 **
November 16, 2024
This was an odd book to tag, genre-wise. Clevenger writes in a literary style (many long and almost dreamy passages and internal dialogues). The story seems like a straightforward thriller: the main character is the son of a serial killer trying to escape his past. There's a crazy homeless guy, however, who knows who he is, and has a message for him, from the "Mother Howl."
That last character is what places this book in a strange place. Chapters alternate between the main character, Lyle Edison, and "Icarus," who is an angel who just landed on Earth in a "meat body" on a mission to deliver a message to Lyle. Or he's a crazy homeless schizophrenic. Their respective chapters are both narrated in third person limited omniscient, and Icarus's internal monologue is very consistent and plausible as either an angel trapped in a monkey-suit or a crazy homeless guy. It's never explained precisely why he needs to deliver a message to Lyle, and his chapters, after a while, fade away as some interesting secondary internal dialog.
Lyle Edison (not his real name) was a teenager when his perfectly normal father was revealed as a serial killer who had raped and murdered at least nine women. Lyle spent the rest of his childhood and teen years getting beaten up every time he's recognized. He was unfortunately a "Junior," sharing a name with his now-infamous father, so he was unable to get a job anywhere. Eventually he resorted to paying a shady forger for false identification, and has now spent his adulthood living under a forged name. In the process, through an unfortunate series of events (this guy has the worst luck in the world), he got caught holding a drug package for a "friend," which resulted in a possession with intent to distribute charge. Now he's on parole, with a pregnant wife, and a parole officer who's well written as the absolute worst and pettiest little tyrant ever.
This was a great story and I really felt for poor Lyle, who's had an absolutely shitty life through no fault of his own. Yes, buying fake papers was a mistake, and he's made other mistakes, but they were all understandable given his circumstances. He now struggles with anger issues, and when he occasionally mouths off and the reader (and later his wife) wants to strangle him for being so foolish, at the same time you can't really blame him. He's been getting kicked around since he was a kid, and it would take the patience and stoicism of a saint not to lose it eventually. Much of the book is Lyle white-knuckling it to the end of his parole, while he (and the reader) wonder if he'll make it.
Icarus's chapters, like I said, were strange and almost ethereal, and they actually could have been cut without affecting the plot too much, but I think they definitely added a touch of the otherworldly.
Inevitably, we know Lyle will eventually have to confront his father's legacy, and I think the climax was executed well.
This was an unusual book with some really sympathetic characters, and an overall theme of just how hard it is to be a little person being crushed in the gears of impersonal or malevolent bureaucracy.
That last character is what places this book in a strange place. Chapters alternate between the main character, Lyle Edison, and "Icarus," who is an angel who just landed on Earth in a "meat body" on a mission to deliver a message to Lyle. Or he's a crazy homeless schizophrenic. Their respective chapters are both narrated in third person limited omniscient, and Icarus's internal monologue is very consistent and plausible as either an angel trapped in a monkey-suit or a crazy homeless guy. It's never explained precisely why he needs to deliver a message to Lyle, and his chapters, after a while, fade away as some interesting secondary internal dialog.
Lyle Edison (not his real name) was a teenager when his perfectly normal father was revealed as a serial killer who had raped and murdered at least nine women. Lyle spent the rest of his childhood and teen years getting beaten up every time he's recognized. He was unfortunately a "Junior," sharing a name with his now-infamous father, so he was unable to get a job anywhere. Eventually he resorted to paying a shady forger for false identification, and has now spent his adulthood living under a forged name. In the process, through an unfortunate series of events (this guy has the worst luck in the world), he got caught holding a drug package for a "friend," which resulted in a possession with intent to distribute charge. Now he's on parole, with a pregnant wife, and a parole officer who's well written as the absolute worst and pettiest little tyrant ever.
This was a great story and I really felt for poor Lyle, who's had an absolutely shitty life through no fault of his own. Yes, buying fake papers was a mistake, and he's made other mistakes, but they were all understandable given his circumstances. He now struggles with anger issues, and when he occasionally mouths off and the reader (and later his wife) wants to strangle him for being so foolish, at the same time you can't really blame him. He's been getting kicked around since he was a kid, and it would take the patience and stoicism of a saint not to lose it eventually. Much of the book is Lyle white-knuckling it to the end of his parole, while he (and the reader) wonder if he'll make it.
Icarus's chapters, like I said, were strange and almost ethereal, and they actually could have been cut without affecting the plot too much, but I think they definitely added a touch of the otherworldly.
Inevitably, we know Lyle will eventually have to confront his father's legacy, and I think the climax was executed well.
This was an unusual book with some really sympathetic characters, and an overall theme of just how hard it is to be a little person being crushed in the gears of impersonal or malevolent bureaucracy.
July 21, 2023
Mother Howl was the second of three novels I pre-ordered this year, all based on the strength of the authors’ previous offerings.
I’ve not been disappointed yet.
Mother Howl is a tremendous slow-burn of a read. Like a boulder on a mountain it is slow to start moving. Like that same boulder there is a certain aspect of momentum, which builds up upon itself. And like that same devastating boulder barreling towards a sleeping village… you can imagine the consequences if the boulder continues on its path unabated.
Mother Howl makes the reader work for it. There are two solid threads of narrative, bobbing and weaving about each other, presented with the rich prose found in both [The Contortionist’s Handbook] and [Dermaphoria]. Here there are more implications than Clevenger’s prior works. When the characters ask questions (which remain unanswered), it becomes the task of the reader to infer, deduce, and posit. I enjoy a book with some bite between its bark, and Saint Heretic - sorry, force of habit - [MOTHER HOWL] fits the bill.
Imagine igniting a hand-held sparkler. There’s an initial burst of phosphorus and colors, before the long stem of glowing white shards brightening the night. But with this sparkler the white bursts get hotter, and brighter, all along the stem. Until, earlier than you’d expect, those sparks begin the fade, and slow, and reduce. And you believe the sparkler is just about to putter out when instead the stem bursts into a feast for the eyes, leaving its holder quietly stunned that such an ending was hidden all along the dull gray twig in their hand.
Reading Mother Howl was akin to holding such a sparkler. And in that quiet moment of finishing the final pages, like having lost all your night vision after watching the darling sparkler, I envy such thoughts as you might explore as you resolve the ending of this story to its start.
“You can only read a story for the first time once.” - Patrick Rothfuss
I’ve not been disappointed yet.
Mother Howl is a tremendous slow-burn of a read. Like a boulder on a mountain it is slow to start moving. Like that same boulder there is a certain aspect of momentum, which builds up upon itself. And like that same devastating boulder barreling towards a sleeping village… you can imagine the consequences if the boulder continues on its path unabated.
Mother Howl makes the reader work for it. There are two solid threads of narrative, bobbing and weaving about each other, presented with the rich prose found in both [The Contortionist’s Handbook] and [Dermaphoria]. Here there are more implications than Clevenger’s prior works. When the characters ask questions (which remain unanswered), it becomes the task of the reader to infer, deduce, and posit. I enjoy a book with some bite between its bark, and Saint Heretic - sorry, force of habit - [MOTHER HOWL] fits the bill.
Imagine igniting a hand-held sparkler. There’s an initial burst of phosphorus and colors, before the long stem of glowing white shards brightening the night. But with this sparkler the white bursts get hotter, and brighter, all along the stem. Until, earlier than you’d expect, those sparks begin the fade, and slow, and reduce. And you believe the sparkler is just about to putter out when instead the stem bursts into a feast for the eyes, leaving its holder quietly stunned that such an ending was hidden all along the dull gray twig in their hand.
Reading Mother Howl was akin to holding such a sparkler. And in that quiet moment of finishing the final pages, like having lost all your night vision after watching the darling sparkler, I envy such thoughts as you might explore as you resolve the ending of this story to its start.
“You can only read a story for the first time once.” - Patrick Rothfuss
June 26, 2024
I listened to this audiobook. It is definitely out of my normal mystery genre. It is the story of Lyle, who at 16 learns his father is a serial killer. He and his mother are painted with his father's brush. Lyle is attacked regularly and almost killed. His mother has retreated into herself and hides in her room, no longer able to mother him. So, Lyle drops out of school and when he learns he can't legally change his name turns to a mysterious stranger who sells him the false documents and instead of Lyle Jr, son of a notorious serial killer, he becomes Lyle Edison, loner. Over the years Lyle scrapes by and eventually falls in love. But, he is a felon, convicted of drug dealing even though he is innocent. He is on probation with a sadistic probation officer tormenting him. Still, he marries Sarah and becomes a father. The surreal part of the book deals with a character who goes by the name Icarus who "fell" from the sky as his wings burned. He is injured but not dead. He has long conversations in the mental hospital where he is sent with a psychiatrist who is basically sympathetic, but unable to reach Icarus. Is Icarus a man or a magical, mythical being. Icarus refers to the Mother Howl - God, or the Universe - who directs him. He claims he has come to earth for a specific purpose and one day he encounters Lyle and then calls him by his birth name. Lyle's imperfect world implodes on hearing his real name. He spirals inside himself to the determent of his marriage and fatherhood. Icarus gives Lyle information about his great grandfather and then waits to be released from his earthly prison. Lyle loses his way, but eventually figures out how to make something of the mess of life in order to give his daughter a better life. Strange and dark and haunting. I enjoyed listening to the narration which I think made the book better for me.
June 11, 2023
Following a 15 plus year hiatus, Clevenger returns with his latest work, Mother Howl, following the life of Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer who ran away from his old life, but is now finding out the complications of assuming a new identity illegally. Running parallel is the story of Icarus, who believes himself to be the Icarus of legend sent on a mission into a inferior new body and new brain,
For the purposes of publishing this has been categorised as a mystery/thriller, but any murders are solved within the first few pages and the book is not so bothered with the crimes committed as the effect they have had on Lyle and the life he tries to lead thereafter. The writing comes with a strong literary bend and reminded me of Cormac McCarthy as the third person narration gives us a grandstand view of proceedings without pre-empting or overegging anything.
Lyle is a fabulous blank slate of a character, who you simultaneously root for and against as he finds himself stuck on the murders that happened twenty years previous and carving out a normal day to day life for himself even after he is literally caught holding the bag of drugs left behind by a hitchhiker.
This is a proper novel, if that makes sense, in that it doesn't provide simple answers or even simple questions. It is a book about consequences to actions passed down via generations and if it is at all possible to shrug these off. Amidst it all, Lyle's PO and his sponsor sit as the angel and devil on his shoulders influencing and swaying his actions and the reasons behind them.
Clevenger's return is a welcome one and with it he brings something original to the table once more as he looks at indirect victims of crimes cascading down from one bad decision to the next.
For the purposes of publishing this has been categorised as a mystery/thriller, but any murders are solved within the first few pages and the book is not so bothered with the crimes committed as the effect they have had on Lyle and the life he tries to lead thereafter. The writing comes with a strong literary bend and reminded me of Cormac McCarthy as the third person narration gives us a grandstand view of proceedings without pre-empting or overegging anything.
Lyle is a fabulous blank slate of a character, who you simultaneously root for and against as he finds himself stuck on the murders that happened twenty years previous and carving out a normal day to day life for himself even after he is literally caught holding the bag of drugs left behind by a hitchhiker.
This is a proper novel, if that makes sense, in that it doesn't provide simple answers or even simple questions. It is a book about consequences to actions passed down via generations and if it is at all possible to shrug these off. Amidst it all, Lyle's PO and his sponsor sit as the angel and devil on his shoulders influencing and swaying his actions and the reasons behind them.
Clevenger's return is a welcome one and with it he brings something original to the table once more as he looks at indirect victims of crimes cascading down from one bad decision to the next.
July 19, 2023
Mother howl is a dark, noir-like, literary fiction. At the beginning we watch the fall out of Lyles father being taken away by the police for his crimes of being a serial killer. The impact on the family and the rest of his childhood, being targeted and bullied for his fathers crimes.
Then we have a slight time jump where Lyle is now a young adult and attempting to escape his fathers legacy. He wishes to change his identity and live in anonymity where nobody knows who he is. It is unsure at this point in the book if he has any similar temptations or characteristics as his father, whether of not he does you can sense he Carry’s deep scars wherever he goes.
There is definitely a sense of magic realism / sci-fi and fantastical elements in this book, especially when we meet a peculiar character, Icarus. He is highly flawed, unusual and hard to put into a box.
This story has two points of view. Lyle who is not who he says he is, and Icarus who strongly believes he is truly Icarus, sent to earth by Mother Howl. As a reader you find yourself wanting to believe him, especially given that the mortals can’t identify him, there is no trace of him in the system, no fingerprints and no online or photographic trace of him.
Are their lives destined to intertwine? Are their paths fated to cross? The entire book is a struggle, reflective and representative of those trapped in an unjust legal system that more often than not, hinders peoples ability to move forward and progress in life in a positive manner.
It is hard to categorize the genre, but in true Angry Robot Book fashion, it has a little of everything. If you are looking to go down the rabbit hole and question your sanity, this may be a good read for you.
Then we have a slight time jump where Lyle is now a young adult and attempting to escape his fathers legacy. He wishes to change his identity and live in anonymity where nobody knows who he is. It is unsure at this point in the book if he has any similar temptations or characteristics as his father, whether of not he does you can sense he Carry’s deep scars wherever he goes.
There is definitely a sense of magic realism / sci-fi and fantastical elements in this book, especially when we meet a peculiar character, Icarus. He is highly flawed, unusual and hard to put into a box.
This story has two points of view. Lyle who is not who he says he is, and Icarus who strongly believes he is truly Icarus, sent to earth by Mother Howl. As a reader you find yourself wanting to believe him, especially given that the mortals can’t identify him, there is no trace of him in the system, no fingerprints and no online or photographic trace of him.
Are their lives destined to intertwine? Are their paths fated to cross? The entire book is a struggle, reflective and representative of those trapped in an unjust legal system that more often than not, hinders peoples ability to move forward and progress in life in a positive manner.
It is hard to categorize the genre, but in true Angry Robot Book fashion, it has a little of everything. If you are looking to go down the rabbit hole and question your sanity, this may be a good read for you.
February 24, 2024
I was fortunate enough to discover Clevenger in college on the recommendation from a friend. My foray into his work began with his first novel, and I quickly read through it and his second. For the years to come, I would periodically check for his work. Finally, Mother Howl was bought by a publisher, many years later, and the world, me included, were gifted another turbulent and prosaic novel from the mind and heart of Craig Clevenger.
Like with his first two novels, what immediately drew me in was the writing. Not only is it poetic, with each sentence digging at something essential to the human psyche, but there is a deep, innate sense of what it means to experience the world through emotions seen through how he crafts his characters, scenes, and themes.
While I’m not sure how Clevenger would wish to classify himself, or be classified, I see him as a writer who captures human emotion and conflict with striking depth and efficiency.
There are tell tale themes embedded in this book, but examined in ways that are distinct, and if not so in the eyes of another reader, at the very least developed with a depth that often alludes over writers and novels.
I found the relationship between Lyle and Sera to be heartbreaking. Lyle, for clear and explainable reasons, cannot ever be who he is around people, for he does not quite understand what that is, who he is. If you are always evading, how can one see themselves in the mirror?
Even if you haven’t read Clevenger’s past work, this is a stunning and great entrance into his writing.
Like with his first two novels, what immediately drew me in was the writing. Not only is it poetic, with each sentence digging at something essential to the human psyche, but there is a deep, innate sense of what it means to experience the world through emotions seen through how he crafts his characters, scenes, and themes.
While I’m not sure how Clevenger would wish to classify himself, or be classified, I see him as a writer who captures human emotion and conflict with striking depth and efficiency.
There are tell tale themes embedded in this book, but examined in ways that are distinct, and if not so in the eyes of another reader, at the very least developed with a depth that often alludes over writers and novels.
I found the relationship between Lyle and Sera to be heartbreaking. Lyle, for clear and explainable reasons, cannot ever be who he is around people, for he does not quite understand what that is, who he is. If you are always evading, how can one see themselves in the mirror?
Even if you haven’t read Clevenger’s past work, this is a stunning and great entrance into his writing.
November 27, 2023
After many decades of being an avid reader, I can truly say this book is as unique as they come in comparison to hundreds of others in its decided genre. I don't think it belongs there, but I can't think of exactly where else it would.
A sixteen year old boy sees his father's face with the words wanted under them on the television. After a long and invasive investigation, the father is found to be a serial killer and ultimately sent to serve a life sentence in prison after a plea deal. The retaliation, harassment and heartbreaking aftermath the boy and his mother endure are beyond heinous. He does the only thing he can think to and leaves, disappears, and starts over.
Years later, the boy now a man believes he escaped, got away from the horror of being his father's son, a killer's son free to be the new him, and live as he wants. It's my experience, the easiest person to fool by lying, pretending, and wishful thinking is myself. Paul too maybe? I'm not sure...
When Icarus, not Mr. Icarus, just Icarus suddenly appears looking as crazy as he is big. Icarus is screaming his real name, his birth name, but how? How does he know? Why Mother Howl, of course. If you figure all that out, please let me know as I'm still trying.
It's a crazy, crazy ride but an entertaining and enjoyable one most of the way through to a thought-provoking ending.
A sixteen year old boy sees his father's face with the words wanted under them on the television. After a long and invasive investigation, the father is found to be a serial killer and ultimately sent to serve a life sentence in prison after a plea deal. The retaliation, harassment and heartbreaking aftermath the boy and his mother endure are beyond heinous. He does the only thing he can think to and leaves, disappears, and starts over.
Years later, the boy now a man believes he escaped, got away from the horror of being his father's son, a killer's son free to be the new him, and live as he wants. It's my experience, the easiest person to fool by lying, pretending, and wishful thinking is myself. Paul too maybe? I'm not sure...
When Icarus, not Mr. Icarus, just Icarus suddenly appears looking as crazy as he is big. Icarus is screaming his real name, his birth name, but how? How does he know? Why Mother Howl, of course. If you figure all that out, please let me know as I'm still trying.
It's a crazy, crazy ride but an entertaining and enjoyable one most of the way through to a thought-provoking ending.
June 17, 2023
I definitely need to re-read this and may well change my rating to five, it felt very....opaque, even for a Clevenger book, which is why it is four stars for me right now. However, I expect I will notice more meanings and connections next time I read it, as I have with his previous novels, which are some of my all time favourites. It has his trademark bleak and beautiful descriptions and dialogue, but with a softer edge and slower pace.
I like the mythological echoes that feel more explicit here that in his previous work (I read Contortionists Handbook as Odyssey, Dermaphoria, Orpheus and Eurydice), and wonder if we are intended to read Lyle Junior and Sera as Theseus and Ariadne to the obvious minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus.
I like the mythological echoes that feel more explicit here that in his previous work (I read Contortionists Handbook as Odyssey, Dermaphoria, Orpheus and Eurydice), and wonder if we are intended to read Lyle Junior and Sera as Theseus and Ariadne to the obvious minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus.
July 6, 2023
After an 18-year hiatus, the long-awaited novelist Craig Clevenger reappears with a superb crime-adjacent novel imbued with mesmerizing elements of magic realism that is too good to read only once. Known for his unique and multifaceted characters, this time, we are introduced to Lyle, whose life changes drastically when he discovers at a young age that his father is a serial killer. Ostracized and threatened, he feels cornered into thinking the only way out is to run far away from the place that refuses to differentiate him from his father's sins. Once he changes zip codes and goes as far as changing his identity, he becomes hopeful that he has a chance at a fresh start. However, his haunting past resurfaces when he’s accused of a felony he did not commit, placing him on probation and risking the exposure of his carefully constructed cover. Then, a mysterious wanderer who calls himself Icarus enters his life with a message that is about to make him question everything he thought he knew about himself and his future. “Mother Howl” possesses a distinct voice that defies comparison to his previous works but is linked with recurring themes such as the flawed system, mental health, and self-identification.
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