The Growling Mouth
by Adam Gnade
Adam Gnade's latest novella, The Growling Mouth, is made up of two connected storylines, each a decade apart and each tied to the next by an infrastructure of shared history and small details.
In the first storyline we follow James Jackson Bozic (main character of Gnade's Hymn California and The Darkness to the West) through his final week in Portland, Oregon before giving up on the city for a life in the wilds.
Says Gnade, "I've been looking for a way to bring together the characters from the two early books and the recent work and this is the first step."
The second storyline concerns Joey Carr and Ted Boone (characters from Gnade's two latest novellas The Heat and The Hot Earth and Hey Hey Lonesome, as well as his upcoming second novel Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden). Carr and Boone navigate a foggy, Dubliners-esque neighborhood en route to wine, a dark apartment, and a terrifying hearthside story set on the shores of Normandy.
What connects the two narratives is an unrecognized past--a suicide, a holiday, a hometown, and the Growling Mouth itself, a ghostly apparition the characters struggle to make sense of.
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I’ve had this zine for a month or two now, but somehow forgot it even existed until I was rooting through boxes of miscellaneous stuff, looking for something else entirely. I didn’t wind up finding what I had initially set out for, but I’m glad I found this.
The Growling Mouth is one of the best novellas (or really pieces of writing in general) that I’ve read in a really long time. The imagery that Gnade manages to seamlessly stuff into every sentence is astounding. Following two different, but interconnected stories, The Growling Mouth makes me feel like I’m riding in the middle seat of a worn out pickup truck traveling through the Midwest while “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins plays quiet through the tinny speakers — a strangle feeling that everything might just turn out alright after all… But maybe not.
This novella pummeled me, staring into the growling mouth myself, and I’ll definitely be reading it again. And soon. One of Gnade’s best.
You can get this novella (and several other of Gnade’s work) from the folks over at Pioneer’s Press. I can’t recommend it enough.