BLACKTAIL

A lone wolf transforms from hunter to harbinger of death in this anthropomorphized grisly vengeance spree.

Following his horror fantasy debut, The Library at Mount Char (2015), Hawkins’ long-awaited second novel tackles folk horror by way of a primal nightmare: the beasts of the earth rising up against humans. For too long the animals of the forest have witnessed the two-leggers bulldoze their dens, poison their rivers, and turn the sacred hunt into an abomination. “They kill without hunger, hurt without purpose,” observes the eponymous half-wolf Blacktail, orphaned in puppyhood after his pack was killed. The subsequent slaughter of his mate, a house dog, and their unborn pups tips him into a bloodthirsty vengeance that captures the attention of the Old Kitty Mother, an ancient feline sorceress faithful to the slumbering Forest God. She elevates the wolf from grieving predator to dark godling set on a gruesome quest to eradicate their shared enemies from the face of the earth. Though the narrative falls into a predictable pattern of travel interludes with other woodland and household animals, Hawkins cleverly distinguishes each fox or bear or even two-legger that Blacktail encounters. Despite the apocalyptic stakes, he grounds the animal protagonists in familiar rituals—they hunger, they love, they protect—and even a relatable sense of humor and honor. The squirrels have a death cult that worships the fearsome beast Car, while the cats’ archaic witchcraft is communicated through feline messengers named Snooky-Ookums. These little moments of levity make the graphic carnage sequences all the more unsettling while emphasizing the former predators’ subjugation by domestication—and, as later chapters reveal, humans’ depthless cruelty to creatures they believe are lesser. So why wouldn’t the Forest God’s subjects want to show two-leggers exactly how that feels?

Eerie and unexpected, a strangely satisfying new take on the hero’s journey.