Mother Howl: For fans of Eileen and The Only Good Indians

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.

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 realismAkin 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.