TITLE: Howl
AUTHOR: Shaun David Hutchison
429 pages, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, ISBN 9781534470934 (softcover, e-book, audiobook)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
Virgil Knox, unwillingly transplanted from big city Seattle to the small southern town of Merritt after his parents’ messy divorce, is already dealing with the trauma of being the new kid – and more, the new openly-gay kid – in town when he’s attacked by … something … in “the sprawl,” a wooded area apparently everyone knows to avoid. Virgil has no memory of how he got there, and no idea exactly what attacked him, except that it was a monster. Nobody in town believes him, of course, not even his overworked father and judgmental grandparents, despite his noticeably clear wounds and post-trauma coping mechanisms (like sleeping in his closet). Well, almost nobody does – but among the few who say they do, which are really friends, and which are setting him up for another fall? This is the set-up for Shaun David Hutchinson’s brilliant and moving novel Howl.
I admit I approached the book expecting a standard story about small town bigotry and the need to develop found family when your blood family lets you down. The book includes all of that, with some nice twists to the tropes, which I won’t spoil. The supporting cast of local students and adults are well-developed, and their relationships to Virgil are developed in a way that kept me guessing as to who might have been behind his attack, who might be setting him up for further bullying, and who might actually care about him.
But what Hutchison delivers is so much more than the tropes mentioned above. I am ashamed to admit it took me almost half of the book to realize what should have been obvious from the start (and was, in retrospect): Howl is about surviving assault, about finding ways to heal from trauma in the face of disbelief and victim-blaming. Virgil’s struggle to overcome this trauma, to find some way back to “normalcy” when his normal has been upended, is the heart of the book much more than solving the mystery of his attack. And this is what might make the book a difficult read for some – while not graphic in description, Hutchinson doesn’t stint on Virgil’s flashbacks to the event or on his nightmares. Readers who have been the victims of sexual assault will undoubtedly recognize Virgil’s choices, which may not be healthy but are utterly, heartbreakingly, realistic.
Victim-blaming is a huge part of those choices: Virgil is constantly told that he shouldn’t have been in the sprawl alone, that he shouldn’t have been drinking, that he shouldn’t be making up stories that are too fantastic to believe. The police investigating the case mock him. The first week of school, he is bullied and harassed, with “monster porn” pictures on his locker. Yes, he finds sympathetic ears – but even those don’t necessarily listen to what Virgil is telling them. Especially not the sympathetic adults. One adult in particular, who we find at the end of the book clearly knew more than they were saying, really frustrated me because of how realistic their actions felt.
While parts of the book were difficult to read, this story is so well told, so well-paced, and has so much to say about surviving and moving on from trauma, that I must highly recommend it. Howl was my first exposure to the work of Shaun David Hutchinson, but it won’t be the last.