In When We Were Animals, Joshua Gaylord (Hummingbirds), who has also written horror novels under the pen name Alden Bell, has managed to craft a werewolf story without any werewolves. Instead, the novel focuses on much more frightening creatures: teenagers.
When We Were Animals is set in a small Midwestern town where adolescents spend a formative year or two running wild. In an unexplained phenomenon tied to the cycles of the moon, they are compelled to shed their clothes and roam the streets in semi-feral packs. It's an excellent, disturbing premise that whittles the werewolf story down to the potent question at its heart: Are humans truly distinct from our animal ancestors?
Gaylord's protagonist, Lumen Fowler, is caught between her family's upstanding reputation--her mother, Lumen is told, never ran wild--and a Thoreau-like determination to revel in life's primitive joys. Her perspective jumps backward and forward in time, bouncing between her adolescence--spent jealously watching her friends "breach" (Gaylord's term for the phenomenon) before finally undergoing the process herself--and her stultified adulthood as an ambivalent wife and mother. The book is largely plotless, embracing a meditative mode enhanced by superb prose.
Gaylord has taken bits and pieces from horror, young adult fiction and literary classics along the lines of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to create Lumen's world. Lumen herself, though, is easily the most impressive component. Under her spell, even the most staid reader would feel the impulse to run wild. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books