When We Were Animals

February 16, 2015
Lumen, the narrator of this disturbing fable from Gaylord (Hummingbirds) that explores the eternal tension between reason and the irrational, grows up with her widowed father in a small Appalachia-like town inhospitable to outsiders. During each full moon, the town’s teenagers “breach”; that is, they run naked and wild, fight with each other, and have sex in the woods. A late bloomer, she moves from childhood into adolescence after her peers; Lumen at first resolves never to breach, but as her hormones begin to stir, she finds herself torn between seemingly good Peter Meechum and wicked Blackhat Roy, who both debases and fascinates her. Gaylord, who has written two horror novels under the pen name Alden Bell, spikes his fitfully lovely language with noisome noir detail. In the end, some readers may regret that Lumen appears to accept that humanity is “a shameful and secret nastiness,” while she misses the honest simplicity of genuine human emotion, too deep for logical explanation. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner Literary.

February 15, 2015
In this coming-of-age tale with a gory twist, Gaylord recounts the troubled adolescence of a good girl in a not-so-good town. It's not unusual for small towns off the beaten path to develop quirky rituals. Lumen Ann Fowler's hometown goes beyond that. When puberty hits, teenagers experience what's known as "breaching," a year-long period of cyclical sex and violence, akin to an orgiastic Rumspringa, which takes place at every full moon on the streets of the town and in the nearby woods. Lumen-the kind of girl with few friends, excellent grades and a great relationship with her widowed dad-is convinced she'll never breach (her mother never did), let alone get her first period. Gaylord cleverly weaves in Lumen's present-day narration, in which she's a happily married mother known as Ann whose husband and young son know nothing about her past, with the events leading up to and including her inevitable inclusion in the bizarre breaching rituals. The usual drama between teenage girls and the boys they covet is heightened not only at school, where the students whisper about their exploits under the previous night's moon, but also during the hypersexualized breaching scenes themselves. At first the tentative Lumen feels outmatched, but as she comes into her own-while unearthing secrets from her mother's past-she discovers that she's a force to be reckoned with. Though the buildup, like Lumen's agonizing wait to breach, is slow, once Gaylord finds his momentum, there's no stopping this bizarrely fascinating journey of dark self-discovery.

Starred review from April 1, 2015

Gaylord (Hummingbirds), who also writes under the pen name Alden Bell (The Reapers Are the Angels), tells the story of Lumen Fowler, a quintessential good girl who grew up in a small American town with a strange secret: the town's teenagers don't just run wild in a metaphorical sense, they literally run wild with each full moon. Looking back at her adolescence from middle age, Lumen examines the year when the young people in her age group went "breach," spending three night a month bustling naked through the streets, engaging in primal acts of sex and violence, while adults and younger children hid in their houses. VERDICT In Lumen, Gaylord creates an unforgettable and, well, luminous narrative voice, and his language captures the lush, dangerous possibilities of teenage nights to perfection. Working both as a contemporary coming-of-age gothic novel and as a metaphorical exploration of the importance and cost of exploring one's instinctual side, this book deserves a breakout success like that of Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides.--Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015
In Lumen's small hometown, there is an odd custom: under every full moon, the teenagers go breach: they run wild, naked and violent. All but Lumen herself, wholike her late motherdoes not. Why? We all have stories to tell, she thinks, and she tells hers in a formal, slightly old-fashioned first-person voice that is studded with odd and arcane wordsbefouled, domiciled, vertiginous, ossuary, immurement, enfabulation, discomfitthat seem more affectation than diction. However, they do help create a mood and tone that are strange and ominous. Accordingly, it's no surprise that Lumen wants to paint like Edward Hopper. I wanted to show the depth of the dark, she says. Her name may mean light, but there is a darkness at her core, or is it, instead, an emotional emptiness? For often she seems oddly unfeeling. There is violence in everything, she casually declares and, later, Cruelty is the natural order of things. Lumen herself is not necessarily cruel, but her actions often seem arbitrary and unmotivated, a failing in a novel that is, nevertheless, saved by its moody atmosphere.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)