Title: When We Were Animals Author: Joshua Gaylord
Published: April 21, 2015
Genre(s): Horror
Page Count: 319
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When Lumen Fowler looks back on her childhood, she wouldn't have guessed she would become a kind suburban wife, a devoted mother. In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown.
When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon. On these nights, adolescents run wild, destroying everything in their path.
Lumen resists. Promising her father she will never breach, she investigates the mystery of her community's traditions and the stories erased from the town record. But the more we learn about the town's past, the more we realize that Lumen's memories are harboring secrets of their own. A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey into the American heartland.
Lovely in both concept and composition, Joshua Gaylord’s When We Were Animals is a coming-of-age confessional unlike any other. Yet, though the book is fascinating, dark, and gorgeous, I ultimately found it to be lacking in complexity and resonance. The reader witnesses the bizarre, ferocious nature of Lumen Fowler’s adolescence, and the author has done a wonderful job with all of it, truly, but at the end I still felt very “so what?” about it all.
Throughout the text, which is narrated retrospectively by an adult Lumen, the reader is constant told how awful, evil, wrong Lumen is, how her actions as a teenager are horrific and gruesome. In spite of these protestations, the portrait Gaylord paints of his protagonist is just the opposite. Lumen, in fact, is very Special within her community of peers. She’s unfailingly polite, never misbehaves, has perfect grades, is well-liked by adults, and is, in every respect, the ideal child. Every full moon, the teenagers in town roam the streets and brawl and have sex, but Lumen stays home. In short: Lumen is very boring, though she constantly hints at “bad things” she’s done.
Eventually, of course, Lumen “breaches” like the other kids in town, and runs wild during the full moon. But even then, she is Special. Gaylord doesn’t exactly define or show how Lumen’s “breaching” is different, but the sense I got was that during the full moon she was more sane, more aware of herself, and less uninhibited. So, even when she’s doing things with her friends, Lumen is still Special. And, really, the only “awful” things she does over the course of the novel are swing a baseball bat at a bully, have consensual sex, run around town naked, and beat up some boy who probably had it coming. I kept reading When We Were Animals expecting Lumen to do something actually horrible, but she never did. Hence the “so what?” feeling by the end of the text. The narration continually promises unthinkable, heinous actions, but they never came. It was disappointing. The book builds itself up to this point of expectancy, but then fizzles out without fulfilling any of its promises.
To add insult to injury, Lumen is introduced initially as “plain” in comparison to her blond, blue-eyed best friend (Lumen has brown hair and eyes). This “plain” descriptor is carried all the way through the text, and it grated. It’s a common trope in fiction to have a character be “ugly” only because of their brown hair and eyes, as if those two traits equate to automatic unattractiveness. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. Brown eyes don’t make you ugly any more than blue eyes make you beautiful. I’ve spoken at length about the predominance of this trope in YA fiction, and though it tends to be less common in adult novels, finding it in When We Were Animals was disappointing, distracting, and upsetting, as well as giving me one more reason to be less than enamored with Lumen Fowler.
Of course, it’s a gorgeous, beautifully written novel. The author’s prose is insightful and evocative and moody, capturing perfectly the Gothic undertones of this story. Though not as dark or horrifying as I’d been led to anticipate, When We Were Animals works very well with subtle disquiet and a sense of unease, which the concept itself, teens reverting to their baser selves every full moon, lends to.
In the grand scheme of things, When We Were Animals has a great deal going for it. Joshua Gaylord’s talent is on full display here, and his style was one I enjoyed a great deal. The only problem seemed to be that, in spite of an excellent opening, the novel was unable to pull everything together and deliver on its promises, instead descending into a conclusion that lacked impact and closure. In the end, it seemed as if Gaylord lost his way amidst the wild tangle of the world he created.
