Hybrid genres, hybrid creatures: Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrel (2016) and Werewolf (Anti)Heroes

The advent of the twenty-first century has seen literary werewolves metamorphosing and emerging in new generic forms. Hybrid genres such as paranormal romance and urban fantasy are spaces in which the werewolf proliferates. Though these novels can be formulaic and gender relations become prey to biological essentialism, they depict werewolves as central characters and eschew the ‘beast must die’ trope of werewolf horror. Werewolves have moved from liminal monsters threatening from the fringes of the narrative to thrive in crossbreed literature. Contemporary lycanthropes engage with themes of monstrosity and hybridity, in ways that increasingly challenge the divide between individuality and community. Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon (2013) uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for terrorism whilst Sharp Teeth (Toby Barlow, 2007), written in free verse, explores homelessness and alienation through warring groups of werewolves; Indra Das’s The Devourers (2015) transposes werewolves to Kolkata, India in a novel that mixes folklore, fantasy and historical literature against a backdrop of colonialism, and the graphic novel Artie and the Wolf Moon (Olivia Stephens, 2021) is about race, queer identity and family aimed at younger readers.
In a genre-defying example of this, Stephen Graham Jones Mongrel (2016) combines bildungsroman with road trip to explore human-lupine identity. Written from a teenage werewolf’s point of view, the novel does not banish the beastliness of the werewolf: an approach which disavows the problematic and fractious reality of the relationship between mankind and the monstrous ‘other’ embodied in our fear of lycanthropy. Adding to werewolf lore, the text suggest that there is still malleability to lycanthropy whilst acknowledging earlier tropes through postmodern intertextuality. Jones’ novel exemplifies twenty-first-century, werewolf narratives which include werewolves that bite, infect and eat humans, but also ones who communicate, thrive, and celebrate their complex identity.