Drool by Charlie Fox

Zoe Thrasher is a teenage misfit with a sick grandfather and she's desperately in need of some escape. Pyromania and fireworks are her only loves until the moonlit night she meets Wolfie-a zonked and dreamy hooligan dealing with Lupine Mutation Syndrome. As the pair throw themselves into their hedonistic courtship, they take us on a wild adventure through a warped version of contemporary London, full of strange bodies, bad dreams and ghosts. Pretty soon, the young lovers are in all kinds of trouble and trouble fits them like a new fur coat. The flames are getting higher and higher, and sirens are coming in the wake of the wolf howls. Drool is a girl-meets-wolf love story, a body horror fable about trauma and transformation, lusciously romantic, wickedly funny, and told in swaggering neon prose. This is 'Red Riding Hood' retold as Romeo and Juliet, a hymn to the joys and terrors of being bad from one of the slyest narrators of recent fiction. If Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red was rewritten in lighter fluid and Slush Puppie or Fernanda Melchor wrote about Bonfire Night, what you'd get would be Drool. Take its crafty paw and get lost. Haven't you ever wanted to explode?