“For surely, I realized that is what we do. We start with one pure and concentrated version of ourselves, then we modify and mold, we layer defense over pretense over convention. By the time we’re done getting dressed in the morning, there is little left of who we really are. It’s all just art.”
Little philosophical poems like that can be found on almost every page of When We Were Animals by Joshua Gaylord. It is quite possibly the most quotable book I have ever read. When We Were Animals is a young adult, horror fiction about Lumen Fowler. It is told in an almost auto-biographical format
of switching back and forth between her childhood and her adulthood by telling small stories that accumulate to a deeper meaning.
Lumen is from a strange town she calls Pale Miranda where the youth go through what they call
breaching. During breaching their feral soul is ignited. They run free through the woods and often they have no want for clothes or their own safety. They run free. Breachers are violent and yet are sent into ecstasy by everything around them.
"People fear those curious interstital creatures who are neither children nor adults."
Breaching happens every full moon for two or three days. The youth in Pale Miranda breach for a year or two and then they grow up and move on to their adult lives. When We Were Animals is full of beautiful analogies to our own obstacles of youth. In the story they go through obvious symptoms of puberty and yet habits of those breaching can symbolize many of the factors of maturing as well. For example, when Lumen’s best friend starts breaching her personality changes and she begins to hang out with people she used to dislike. This often happens to friends who go through puberty at different times.
"I walked out of his voice. Thats what it felt like. I opened the door in the room of my father's voice, stepped outside, and shut the door behind me."
As for the actual plot, there are a few twists. One of this twists I didn’t see coming immediately. I was embarrassed by how close to the reveal it was when I finally put all the pieces together. I also would not suggest this book to anyone who needs a heavily plot-driven story. The plot moves along slowly as bits and pieces are collected through Lumens memories.
"To endure suffering-it's the most romantic thing of all, don't you think?"
My favorite character in the story was in fact Lumen. I disliked most of the other characters in one way or another, but from her perspective you are really supposed to. The most interesting character is Blackhat Roy. He is the opposite of most everyone Lumen knows and he is truly an onion of layers upon layers of depth.
"It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes."
When We Were Animals is not a book for modest people. There is nudity in many senses of the word and there is a lot of violence. It is tragic story, but a beautiful one. It shows the true poetry that can be found in the most violent of actions, the beauty in blood that horror writers like myself ache for.
I gave this book a four out of five on Goodreads. For anyone with a strong gut and an open mind for a beautiful tale with sharp edges, I would definitely suggest When We Were Animals.
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