The Growling Mouth

"Adam Gnade's 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. The second storyline concerns Joey Carr and Ted Boone (characters from Gnade's latest novel, Caveworld). 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." -- Pioneers Press