Dark novel filled with ugliness, grotesquery, psychopathology, and grief, culminating with, among other things, murder-by-underground hog confinement manure pit, all topped off with inconsistencies in the manuscript. ( )

'Little Wolves' is a bleak, dark, book, permeated with a sense of inevitable doom. It's filled with violence, abuse, death, deception, torture and oppression. The writing style felt a little self-consciously literary at times and seemed to be reaching for a deeper meaning beneath the story which I wasn't convinced by. The narrative is deeply, sometimes disturbingly, realistic but is laced with references to Norse myths, the nature of monsters and the heroes who battle them, the inescapability of fate and a belief in the reality-shaping power of storytelling.

Set in a small, failing town on the Minnesota prairies in 1987, it starts with a troubled teenager shooting the local sheriff with a sawn-off shotgun and follows the impact the killing has on the boy's father and the boy's teacher. The teacher is the preacher's wife, newly arrived, newly married, newly pregnant, haunted by old myths learned from her father about her absent-since-her-birth mother and hungry to discover her origins and root herself. The father of the boy is a struggling local farmer, widower and social outcast with a long-standing enmity with the sheriff. Both the main characters are outsiders with complicated views of the world, and trauma in their past that has twisted their belief in their agency over their own lives.

This is not a conventional drama where the reader is focused on working out how the hero will overcome overwhelming odds and right all the wrongs. Here, the heroes seem cursed, doomed to come face to face with monsters who will do them harm. Hope is replaced by stubborn endurance. Righting wrongs is replaced by the possibility of survival.

The town and the people in it are, for the most part, deeply unpleasant and entirely believable. The violence and anger and oppression that sits just beneath the surface of the social life of this failing town owes nothing to the supernatural and everything to a culture hierarchical culture dominated by violent men and sustained by a consensual silence about how the town works and a collective investment in an alternative narrative in which everything is fine.

There were points in this book when I became completely absorbed in the writing and in the disclosed pasts of the two main characters but there were other points when I felt that it was over-written and over-structured. It reminded me of one of those neo-gothic Scottish Baronial style castles that the Victorians built, look at them one feature at a time and you can admire each turret, medieval arch and mullioned window but when you look at the building as a whole it lacks authenticity.

I got the sense that Thomas Maltman has a strong dislike of rural, Lutheran-dominated small towns and the gap between how life works and how it is described. This book seemed like a way of taking a fresh look at the things he dislikes.
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I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. It's a Gothic prairie murder mystery, laced with Norse mythology and Beowulf. Definitely not forgettable! ( )

Wanted to love this book as I loved Night Birds, but I did not. Writing was not the same and story line was convoluted. Read for book club and the discussion was good because there were a lot of topics introduced but overall the book did not work for me. ( )

This is one of those books where I liked the writing, but didn't quite know what to make of the plot. It involved a lot of things that I don't really know what's up with -- the Midwest, farms, Lutherans ...

The basic plot has some of the elements of a thriller -- it opens with a crime committed by a high school student, and throughout the book you get a lot of Dark Secrets Revealed kind of stuff -- but one thing I liked about it is that the book's focus remains on the interior lives of the main characters for the most part. While it's not a supernatural story, a big theme is how different people respond to ideas about the unknown, whether it be in a religious way or more of a folklore approach.

While I'm usually a fan of the Small Town, Big Secrets type of book, this did seem a little over the top, but I don't know, there's probably a reason I live in NYC. My biggest hurdle with this book was not being able to muster a lot of empathy for the primary character, the pregnant wife of the town's new pastor. I never quite got what her deal is ... she's cool with being rude (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not) in random social interactions, but doesn't seem able to apply any actual assertiveness to situations where it would be, you know, productive. I got the vague feeling that some of her, I'll say outbursts although that's not exactly it, are supposed to be chalked up to her pregnancy, although the book never managed to convince me of that. It always seemed to be the very stereotypical "pregnant ladies, go figure!" attitude.

Overall, this was a book that didn't really click with me in any board sense, but I did find it to be an easy, quick, and engrossing read while it was happening. ( )