Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

5 reviews

nicosta_music's review

adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

As someone who is a connoisseur of werewolf novels, Mongrels immediately became one of my favorites. It starts off pretty slow and unremarkable as far as these kinds of books go, but by the end I was absolutely in love. The book has such strong and hard-hitting themes about human (or I guess non-human) nature and about how you define yourself, especially by those you surround yourself with. This book is definitely gory and brutal and doesn't pull any punches, but it performs in a way that really hammers home the wisdom it is imparting.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Confinement, Death, Gore, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Kidnapping, Grief, Cannibalism, Stalking, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Alcoholism, Child death, Cursing, Gun violence, Rape, Medical content, and Alcohol

Minor: Bullying and Vomit

booksthatburn's review against another edition

Focuses too much on a particular topic that's triggering to me.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Body horror, Death, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Violence, Death of parent, and Pregnancy

aformeracceleratedreader's review

It's just so slow for me and not interesting enough. I don't want to keep trying to make myself read something I'm not even remotely enjoying at this point. I think if I had the audio it would've helped, but my library doesn't have it. The concept is cool, love werewolves, and liked the beginning a little bit, but everything about this book isn't doing it for me. 
Sucks because I loved My Heart is a Chainsaw. I'll try another book by this author and hopefully it isn't like Mongrels.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, and Blood

Moderate: Death, Gore, Gun violence, Medical content, Death of parent, Alcohol, and Injury/Injury detail

lynxpardinus's review

dark emotional reflective sad tense

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Confinement, Death, Gore, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Cannibalism, Death of parent, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Bullying, Domestic abuse, Racism, Sexual content, Torture, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Vomit, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Medical content, Car accident, Fire/Fire injury, and Alcohol

Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Drug abuse, Homophobia, and Pedophilia

Contains discussion of bestiality - as well as a scene where a werewolf in shift is mounted by a dog, albeit evidently against her will.
Antisemitism warning is just in case, for a chapter that involves a Jewish cemetery.

talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This is the way werewolf stories go.
Never any proof. Just a story that keeps changing, like it’s twisting back on itself, biting its own stomach to chew the poison out.

Mongrels is a solid book: Powerfully written, well-developed, and emotionally impactful. I've read Stephen Graham Jones's writing before -- I read his short story Wait for Night not long ago -- but this is the first full-length novel of his I've read, and I'll certainly be checking out more in the future.

I'd be remiss not to mention the actual writing of Mongrels first. The prose is interesting and eloquent without ever being too much to parse, a skill I always appreciate. The writing all but flows off the page, compelling and gripping even when it strays a hair too far into "showing" over "telling" (a balance that is overall very neatly maintained). That said, the way the chapters are arranged -- always centered around the same narrator, but shifting between first- to third-person every other chapter, and with some muddling of the timeline -- can be hard to follow.

The main cast of Mongrels, the narrator and his werewolf aunt and uncle, aren't necessarily likable, but they are complex, compelling, and -- ironically -- human. Their dynamics rang true as a dysfunctional but ultimately well-meaning non-nuclear family. And on the note of them being werewolves, the worldbuilding in that regard is stellar. It's unlike any werewolf lore I've come upon in fantasy before, but every bit of it works.

It's definitely pretty brutal in terms of content, and Jones doesn't skimp on the detail in regards to violence and gore. I'll admit that I'm already a bit squeamish, especially with regards to animal death/harm, so a few scenes were enough to make my stomach turn, but that didn't make me put it down (for long, anyway). Though it can seem gratuitous, the blood and gore are never necessarily out-of-place; they add rather well to the overall plot and themes. If you're like me, you'll likely feel uncomfortable reading a lot of Mongrels -- and in my case, that only added to my enjoyment.

Messy, raw, and real, Mongrels is a coming-of-age tale unlike any other, and not entirely because of the werewolves. I don't know if it's necessarily a title I'd recommend, but it certainly is one I personally enjoyed.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Death, Gore, and Violence

Moderate: Gun violence, Medical content, and Cannibalism

Minor: Domestic abuse, Pedophilia, Vomit, and Antisemitism

Pedophilia/CSA warning is for a past teen pregnancy (the mother was 14), with some heavy implications that the father was an adult. Antisemitism tag is for a scene around a temple that's framed a little weirdly. Car accidents are described in detail a couple of times. There's also a fair bit of unsanitary content; nothing in too graphic detail, but vomit, urination, and defecation are all described at one or multiple points.