I’ve been following Craig since Handbook came out two decades ago. When I saw Mother Howl was coming out, I made a NetGalley account just to get to experience this one a little early. I was glad I did. From the beginning I was hooked. Shortly after we meet Icarus, and I was double hooked. It was a book unlike anything I’ve read before and will ever read again. I waited nearly 20 years for this book and would gladly wait another 20 for his next, though I hope it won’t be that long.


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It’s been 18 years since Clevenger’s last book and 21 since the fantastic The Contortionist’s Handbook so I was incredibly eager to see a new book on the way with the release of Mother Howl.

The book follows Lyle from childhood, where at 16 his life is turned upside down as his father is arrested for murder. The book stays with Lyle as he obtains a new identity and experiences true pain, loss and love.

Mixed in with Lyle’s narrative, we meet Icarus - a strange homeless man. These sections seemed slightly slower at first but when I was around a quarter through the book I found myself enraptured with both characters. It’s a very unique book and it’s a shame to say farewell to Lyle after going through so much with him.

"The time comes when your sun's turned black and the last bones of your last descendants have crumbled to dust miles beneath miles of ice, I will still be humbly serving the beck and call of the Mother Howl."

The long, long awaited Mother Howl is here, based on The Fade, a hell of a short story and also running parallels with Act of Contrition (a mythological name? Prayers? Memory slips? Following a divine voice?) from the anthology Warmed & Bound. We've seen excerpts popping up here and there, this part trimmed out from the manuscript possibly. The publishing date was long extended and dismissed until now. Eighteen years of time has passed between this book and Clevenger's breathtaking exercise in paranoid prose Dermaphoria. He wasn't entirely gone though. Despite the long silence, his presence remained ever strong as a teacher with his essays on the craft.

I am aware how the book blurb sounds and let me get something out of the way, you're not getting a noir thriller. It's going to be slow, unusual, linear and quite nothing like his previous works. Still I can't talk about his latest without touching his entire oeuvre because they thematically lead to it. Cycling through the same strain against authority, faith, dilemma of shed identities, doomed lives, Craig Clevenger yet again reworks his entire style down to the crumbs. The gravity of his trademark voice is lacking here but that lack is also by choice. His prose is in turns easing, numbing, lilting, humming, electric and a spare cocktail of all these when Icarus struts across the pages.

Now Icarus, you see, is conceptually a blur of a character, free in all his orphic magical-realism and just as much confined. I had no gist where it was all going when I first met him. His mannerism, his "lexified . . . Aardvark to Zzyzyx, Oxford-style" word-melding dialogues, and partly humorous helplessness in the face of The System were the highlights of book's first half. Wherever he went, he left a syrupy wake of otherworldness.

Which brings me to Lyle. The Sisyphus to Icarus. Boulder-pushing ascent of a life contrasting the wingless fall of another. A man with discarded identity and the other with none at all. One's hiding and the other's looking. Without revealing much, Lyle is every bit the trapped protagonist as John Vincent Dolan and Eric Ashworth. They are what Clevenger means when he wrote in Dark Matters, "For the living, to be . . . disregarded—to be treated like a ghost—can be worse than meeting one. I don’t write ghost stories, but I do write about characters who are both figuratively haunted and who have in some fashion themselves been rendered ghosts." Whether it's a forger determined to remain invisible, a criminal amnesiac existing without his past, or Lyle running away from the cancerous legacy of his father's name, they're all human phantoms. Continued in the same article, "I write about people who are fundamentally alone." In fact, there is one literal realization of this concept which I can't put here without a spoiler tag.

I'll admit I was slow to finish it. The only downsides were the feeling of scattershot ideas quilted into a longer format and the comparison it inevitably invoked to its predecessors. The former made it appear thinner on all fronts even though it's Clevenger's longest work and he is as sharp as ever on sentence level. Latter is any risk-taking artist's fear. Charting fresh waters, the old way potency suffers a smidge.

Sum is greater than its parts, Mother Howl is the comeback of the writer channeling his muse from godless hallways of the fevered and the lost and the wandering. I'll even read his grocery lists, frankly.

[A no-nonsense fan footnote: The Contortionist's Handbook is my all-time favorite — and hands down the best discovery you'll have — in the entirety of neo-noir scene, so for the love of dear Mother Howl, get to that that. There's also a cameo I adored.]

Thanks to Netgalley and Datura Books for providing me with a digital ARC!

Lyle has been successfully hiding from his true identity for close to twenty years. However, a homeless stranger named Icarus seems to know who he really is, leading Lyle to re-examine his past, his family, and his true identity.

Mother Howl interweaves magical realism with modern noir, blending the dream-like quality of Icarus’s sections, with the hard-bitten claustrophobia of Lyle’s narrative. The book explores themes of power, authority and identity, echoing Clevenger’s debut ‘The Contortionist’s Handbook’, to which there are definitely nods.

I found the first third of the book a little slow, however the pacing of the rest of the book was good and kept me reading into the early hours. Overall, I thought the exploration of the book’s themes was well done and I was intrigued by Lyle and Icarus’s stories.