Where the Wild Things Are turns 60 this November. Yet, with its unforgettable colour palette of pinks, blues and greens and its depiction of perennial childhood joys like tree swinging and piggyback rides, it looks as fresh as the day it was born. The story of a loveable rascal called Max whose mother sends him to his room for causing mayhem, it takes a more mysterious turn when, left alone, Max conjures a vivid world of towering trees and vines and sails off to become king of an island of party-loving monsters, before getting lonely and returning home.
I fell into this story. It was like pulling on the thread of a fraying jacket and not being able to stop myself even as the fabric started to come undone. In my memory, the morning everything started it was snowing and I was about to log onto a Zoom class when my husband came home and told me about the teepee. He’d run into the woman who tended it and asked her why it had been destroyed. I got it into my head that I had to figure out who kept knocking down the teepee and why.
Then everything started unraveling on its own.
The Adonis may be my nightcap, but is more often than not someone else’s night-starter; a glass of Champagne before bed, meanwhile, signals a sort of rewiring of perspective. A good night’s rest is not a begrudgingly logical endpoint of a day, but a beginning. It is an opening toast to the after-party of the subconscious; a toast to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.
As terrifying as the novel becomes, it’s also, at its core, a lot of fun. Its characters are kids hurling themselves at the world, escaping their past as much as finding themselves. They are reckless and headstrong but relatable. Each is essentially powerless when the story opens: traumatized, poor, displaced, angry, yet freed by the force of the music they mainline together. “Gone to the Wolves” is an anti-establishment treatise, bildungsroman and extreme love letter to the flame of youth.