Mother Howl is a literary crime fiction, written by Craig Clevenger, and published by Datura Books. A story about dealing with the scars of the past, really centered around the characters and their respective traumas, following Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer, a man who is trying to flee from his past and avoid becoming somebody like his father.

Lyle was always Lyle, but when at his sixteen years-old, his father was revealed as a serial killer, all his life shattered; he fled from his house and illegally changed his name, looking to start from zero.
Twenty years living under that new identity, he's currently on probation system for a crime he didn't commit, but is slowly building a life, having a wife, waiting for a baby; that's until a mysterious character, Icarus, literally descends from the sky.

Icarus is definitely an element that shakes us the whole novel ideal; no documentation, no way to identify him. He's convinced of hearing the voice of Mother Howl, an enigmatic figure that might represent something akin to God/its voice in this story. And when Icarus calls Lyle by his real name, that identity he tried to conceal from everybody, the foundations of Lyle's new life get shaken.

Lyle is a flawed character, essentially; he tried to leave her past behind when he paid to get the documentation that made his new identity possible, but he hadn't stopped looking behind with the fear somebody would discover him. His daughter and his wife are the reasons he needs to avoid getting into problems.

Mother Howl is a weird novel, in the sense we could classify it into different genres, such a noir thriller, but for moments it borders the magic realism. Pacing suffers a little due to this, being definitely slower than what I would have expected.

Said that, I think the weirdness is one of the details that makes the reading experience something memorable, complemented with a carefully crafted prose; you are definitely not prepared for what Clevenger proposes with Mother Howl.