Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is not your typical werewolf book.

Werewolves have been twisted, molded, and (in my opinion) maligned in popular fiction and movies. Vampires have archetypal antecedents to draw on—Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu, for example—that rammed certain traits into the collective consciousness. (The unconscious being an entirely different matter.) Writers have played games with the Undead archetype, but Dracula always lurks in the shadows.

There are no similar archetypes for shapeshifters, so writers are free to run wild and howl at the moon (if indeed the moon is important for werewolves). In Mongrels, Jones creates distinct werewolf lore—and, boy, is it different from what you’ve seen before. As someone who’s thought a lot about werewolves over more than twenty years, I applaud the originality and depth of Jones’ creations in Mongrels. This guy has really thought it through, including the nasty parts that make you want to turn the page quickly.

The story’s protagonist is an unnamed boy who starts the novel at age eleven and ends at sixteen. He travels with his aunt and uncle, both werewolves, and wonders if he will ever “shift” (be able to turn into a wolf, that is). In this universe, werewolves don’t shift until their early teens. We follow this werewolf family, originally from Arkansas, all over the Southeast, never staying in one place for long. Being werewolves, a lot of shit happens to them—much of it, disasters of their own making. These are trailer-trash werewolves, loyal to family, scraping by, barely employable.

The novel is bloody, brutal, and often funny. The book is mostly told in first-person from the boy’s point of view, with more formally written third-person vignettes interspersed. The central characters are believable, as people and as werewolves. Jones describes the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells expertly, merging the supernatural with the everyday world.

Each chapter is a standalone episode, a short story that fits into the larger canvas of the novel. The episodes have a sameness to them: werewolves come to town, find trouble, blow something up or burn down a house, and have to skip town in a hurry. Details of the family’s history gradually accumulate; mysteries are solved.

If you want a very different look at werewolves and you’re not squeamish, Mongrels is a wild ride worth taking.