"Wolf at the Table" is a measured, decade-spanning portrait of a family tainted by violence. The narrative spans 60 years and is told by multiple members of the Larkin clan.

Adam Rapp's writing here is tremendous, capitalizing on such gradual and subtle character development along with slow-building tension. It never feels exploitative or overly sensational despite the subject. Mostly, it's all engrossing, but some portions lag and meander away from the core plot before returning. It likely could have benefitted from one more close edit.

Thanks to the author, NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

TLDR: I had a couple friends whose taste I trust fall absolutely head over heels for this multigenerational family drama with a serial killer twist, so I was sold pretty quickly on this one.

And I really liked a LOT about it. It’s THE CORRECTIONS meets I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK, and I was captivated by the character stories told over the course of several decades. That being said, I struggled with the disconnect between the sibling characters (they don’t really interact with one another that much), and the time jumps between each chapter -while driving the story forward- end up keeping readers at a distance. Overall, it’s definitely a recommendation, though I might suggest physical book over audio, as the narrator was very cold in his delivery.

WHERE THE WOLVES ARE

Let’s never dismiss the power of impending doom to keep a reader going. Long before the dark resolution of Adam Rapp’s novel, Wolf at the Table, we know there’s no way for this to end well.

Nonetheless, it is well worth the read, both as an example of fine writing and as a case study in the reality of the pressures and stresses on American families—in particular, white working-class families with strong ties to traditional Catholicism. Happy families are nice and boring, to paraphrase Tolstoy. This unhappy family is really interesting.

As the novel opens in 1951, the barely teenage Myra Larkin meets a handsome young man in a nice car who tells her he’s Mickey Mantle. Whether he is or isn’t, he gives her a ride home and a rookie card. She spends the evening wondering about her encounter, but the wee hours of the morning are disrupted by discovery of the mass murder of an entire family just a few houses down the block.

Yeah, this isn’t the Fifties of “Happy Days” and Boomer nostalgia. This is the Fifties of Charles Starkweather’s rampage and the massacre of the Clutter family in Kansas, which is to say that it is much, much closer to reality than the MAGA crowd wants to believe.

Among Myra’s fellow gawkers is her slightly younger brother, Alec, and we immediately know—as Myra does—that there’s something not right with that boy.

The novel follows the expected arc of a multigenerational novel, with Myra and her siblings growing up, her parents aging, but instead of the uplifting, triumph-over-adversity American Dream pap of so many of those books, we get heaping doses of reality, one right after the other. This includes the struggle against poverty and the stress of just keeping one’s head above water; abusive priests; trauma both internalized and externalized; and mental health struggles. There are also unhealthy doses of denial, which anyone raised by either the Greatest or the Silent Generation will be very familiar.

And then we get John Wayne Gacy.

Rapp has written that his late mother was a nurse at the Joliet prison where Gacy spent time on death row, and he believes her to have been the nurse who gave the killer a last physical check before execution. This, then, is the seed of inspiration; the novel itself is a revelation.

As frustrating as it might feel to watch Myra struggle, she is a heroine and main character worthy of our attention. Despite her desire to behave as others’ expect, she finds a moral center that retains compassion while still protecting what must be sheltered, notably, her son, Ronan.

And Alec? He is fascinating in an altogether different way. Our attention to Alec is like slowing down to look at a wreck on the highway, then speeding up to get as far as we can, as fast as we can. Yes, he draws a bad hand, but so do a lot of other people—including his sister. Eventually, the novel comes to the same conclusion about Alec that Bruce Springsteen came to about Starkweather: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”

This is not a story about a seial killer. It is a story about a family, and one of its members happens to be a seiral killer. While all of the children were raised in the same household, they lived very different adult lives.

Original, I guess. A good read, no. Unless you like books with zero happiness. I never read The Corrections to which this is likened, but I remember it being touted much the same. Guess people like well written angstsy books with not much of story. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

I think I expected something very different from this book--perhaps something more like Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth, which used a kind of true crime scenario as a springboard into unrolling landscape, but this instead wove in and out of serial minds, all of which were terrifying and uncomfortable. I should have anticipated a kind of darkness to the book, but this felt creepy-basement-with-a-terrible-drip dark.

This book- if you like literary suspense, get this on your list.

This is a multigenerational saga about a family with secrets and explores the question, how does a person from a seemingly normal family become a mass murderer?

As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.

As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. Alec becomes an increasingly alienated from the family and his mother begins to receive strange and ominous postcards. Year after year, the family pretends not to see what they know to be true- and i’ll let you read it to find out what that is.

I loved this book- its right in line when what i love about literary suspense. I think it’s worth nothing that the while the set up is with Myra and the man who she believes is Mickey Mantle, that’s just the beginning. It spans 1951 to 2010, and you get to see the trajectory of all of the family members' lives. The author does a great job weaving in current events of the time as casual mentions, which was subtle but so brilliant. I love learning about history as it’s happening via the characters in the book. I was worried there’d be too many characters and too many subplots, but Rapp wove a really compelling story with fully realized characters that never had me wondering who was who. I purposefully called this literary suspense and not a thriller b/c it’s not. It’s more a family story and a sibling story with ominous undertones than anything else.

Something I was glad to know going into this story was that it was inspired by the author’s mother. She was one of 13 children in a scotch irish catholic family from elmira NY, who worked as a nurse at statesville correctional facility, not too far from where i am in Illinois. He found out IRL that she was likely the nurse who performed John Wayne Gacy’s last physical before his execution. He wrote this because he became intrigued by a simple decent woman’s proximity to such horrendous violence. Fascinating inspiration!


At any rate- this is a 5 star read for me. It’s a rich story with a lot to unpack that i think will appeal to a lot of readers, particularly ones who like historical literary fiction with a dark side.

4.5 stars rounded up. Man this is the kinda story I love. Family drama at its finest spanning over 60 years. We start with Myra, eldest sibling of Fiona, Lexy, Joan, Alec, and baby Archie. Myra is finally allowed some solace from the chaos of such a big family by her mother Ava allowing her to spend time at the local diner each night after dinner where she reads The Catcher in the Rye repeatedly. One night, a man who claims to be Mickey Mantle sits across from her and offers her a ride home. Mere hours later the family across the street is brutally murdered. Did Mickey Mantle have something to do with it? Brushes with infamous killers are riddled throughout this story, showing us the death row end of John Wayne Gacy, and other true to life events which kept me completely invested in the background of the main story. As the years pass we focus mainly on Myra, Alec, and Myra’s son Ronan as they navigate getting older and coping with mental health issues and childhood trauma. I do Wish we got a little more from Fiona and Lexy, as both were interesting in the little we do see them. The writing here is superb and I will Hold onto these characters for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A deep dive into the look of a very dysfunctional family. We see the ups and downs of life through the 1950's to more modern decades. Deeply evocative, rich in description. Not to be missed.

5⭐️ 𝚁𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠: (Thanks to @LittleBrown #gifted.) Why? Why? Why have I seen almost nothing here on Bookstagram about 𝗪𝗢𝗟𝗙 𝗔𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗧𝗔𝗕𝗟𝗘 by Adam Rapp? This book is everything I love in a dysfunctional family novel. Its characters are interesting, unusual, and deep. They hold secrets big and small, and others very, very dark. It’s those darkest secrets that so unflinchingly propel this family drama.⁣⁣
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At its heart are the Larkins, a strict Catholic family made up of an overbearing mother, a quiet father, four sisters, and two brothers. Beginning in 1951 in Elmira, NY, the chapters alternate telling between members of the family, with Myra, the eldest daughter (loosely based on the author’s mother) taking on a large role. This is a family who often live in the space of love/hate relationships amongst themselves. Some are deeply flawed, even scary. The story spans almost 60 years, so there is time for much to develop and come to light.⁣⁣
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From the opening pages we understand that this is a family touched by danger, by evil, though what that evil is remains unclear for a very long time. Instead, there exists a disconcerting anticipation that was beautifully crafted by Rapp. Darkness was always on the edges of their lives, often more of a feeling than anything else. Rapp hinted at it, rather than flaying it open. I loved how he did this, enticing me to read page after page, always wanting to know more.⁣⁣
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Rapp’s words in his letter to readers sums his inspiration up well: “I wanted to honor my mother’s life, and I wanted to examine how a seemingly normal family - a good, hardworking, lower-middle-class family - can be in a relationship to this very scary part of America.” This is EXACTLY what he accomplished and I loved it! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Adam Rapp's WOLF AT THE TABLE is exquisite. Given the subject matter of the novel, I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of the actual storytelling. I've been a fan of Adam Rapp for some time, so I should not have been surprised by his nuanced approach. The writing is sublime in its descriptions and unparalleled in terms of the tension in its scenes. The scene with Myra and the "young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle" in his car made my skin crawl; I was terrified by Myra. She was so unaware of the danger she'd put herself in and it was not clear from moment-to-moment what "Mickey Mantle" was going to do or say to Myra. The character of Myra was so well written; it was fantastic to follow her through so many years.

I also loved Rapp's portrayal of Alec; he wasn't softened with some heartbreaking backstory. Instead, he was human and Rapp wrote Alec as a complex, at times frustrating character, that I was grateful to read.

This book is a master class in character development and tension. I can't wait to share it with my creative writing students.

This book had me Griffin every minute.You never knew it was gonna happen. It starts out in Elma, New York.
In the 50s.. Mya is the oldest girl. W
d Who's raised in a catholic family. One day when she was thirteen when she went to the diner she met mickey mantle. She went for a ride with him in his car. Things were very tense when she got home because the baby brother was very sick. Everybody had a different perspective at this time. She had 2 sisters.One was very bright and the other one named flora was the Very rebellious. Alex the brotherhood a lot of problems too. They had a triple murder one night in their neighborhood. Things were going along really well. Meyer became a nurse. Flora seemed to drift around and part of the counter culture of the 60s.
Alex was very messed up in the head because he was abused by the priest in the neighborhood.
Parish Flora used to take a lot of money from her family and her sister. And alex did the same thing. M y r a was friends with the nurses killed in the sixties in chicago. Death seemed to follow her all around.. She met a man named dave but he was deranged in the head. She did not realize this and still married him. They had a son name. R o n n. You had a lot of mental problems and you finally left the family. M y a was working in the prison when they killed gary the other serial killer. Alex did the same thing across many states.He would send postcards to his mother.Hello in goodbye. You had a trouble passed and you never seemed to get over it. You can see the conflict how in this book everybody had problems. As Ryan got older, he had the same problems as his father and he also married and had a son, but he worked out his problems. The ending is quite.
Interesting as well and you're really enjoying it

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC. First, this is an incredible book. When I read that it was considered a bit of a mix of Franzen’s, The Corrections (I’ve not read, but have read other books by him) and Shriver’s, We Need to Talk About Kevin (one of my all-time favorite books), I knew I had to read it. It was hard to put down. It alternates between characters, dates, and cities, beginning in the 1950s to current day. This story centers around the Larkin family. The switch between characters and dates works incredibly well to tell the story. It’s obvious that not all is well with some of the characters, most especially one in particular. If you enjoy family sagas, grab this book. I loved the preface from the author, Adam Rapp, at the beginning of the novel as to why he wrote this novel. I highly recommend this book!

This is a novel that spans sixty years and four generations of a large Catholic family, the Larkins. As with many large families, the offspring have a wide range of personalities and levels of success. There is also one child who has an intellectual disability, one who marries into a family with, unbeknownst to her, a history of schizophrenia, and one who was abused by local priests as a child and develops an antisocial personality disorder (commonly known as a “psychopath”). This true cross section of America is revealed through snapshots of family members at different points in time, particularly focusing on two of them who quite disparate in their temperaments.

Well written, the narrative in this character driven novel is rather objective; Rapp didn’t exploit the emotionalism of the antisocial behaviors and family difficulties. He touches on serial killers, with passages involving Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, and, of course, the Larkin sibling who is a serial killer and we see how family can be complicit or ignorant. There is an undercurrent of danger, perhaps even evil throughout the story.

I couldn’t engage with any of the characters Often I read a family saga such as this and, although it may be dark, am left with some feelings of hope. After this one, which was mesmerizing, a generalized bleak feeling remained.

I didn’t find this story very interesting, possibly because it was full of events yet devoid of expressed feelings - maybe that was the author’s intent. This character-driven family saga follows the Larkin family. Myra, the main character, is the eldest of 6 children in a strict Catholic family when we meet her at 13. Myra has 3 sisters and 2 brothers, one of whom died as an infant from rheumatic fever. Myra takes on a lot of parental responsibility at a young age and continues to do so later in life, caring for and supporting her younger siblings well into adulthood. Her brother Alec, a former altar boy, was a thief by age 10 (and a victim of sexual assault from several priests). Stealing church funds at age 18 got him kicked out of the family home, and he spent his young adult years roaming the country doing odd jobs, hanging out with criminals who kill at will, and calling Myra for financial assistance or just a shoulder to cry on when he was too drunk. The underlying theme is that mental illness, deviance, and violence are always nearby, and no one can be trusted, not even your siblings or your spouse.

It is curious that the last two books I have read developed from a seed in the authors' past. Each author had physical memories passed down to them, giving one the entire history of the family and the other snatches of memories in a shoebox delivered over two decades later.

I enjoyed these brilliant family sagas, Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp and This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud. After reading these incredible novels, I thought that much of the literature I've read recently by older authors telling family stories might be a catalyst for creating a new genre: Aging Adult Fiction (alternative adjectives could include Old, Older, Personal Long History). I like the categorization, and I love the books. The first one for me was Elizabeth Strout, who wrote about fleeing New York with her ex-husband at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Lucy by the Sea. Then there was Ian McEwan in Lessons.

These literary giants wrote about what life looks like when viewed from the prism of what was on offer at the beginning of life and how things played out for all the familial characters. Rapp's large family in Elmira, New York, shook me to the core with hints of horrific events happening close to what seemed like a typical lower middle-class family with four sisters and two brothers. Myra, the oldest daughter, told the main POV chapters, followed by the mother and the brother. As time passed and children were born into this family, Ronin became my hero. Folks, this is not a gentle stroll down memory lane. But it was worth every minute I spent reading this brilliant novel.

On the other side of Aging Adult Fiction is the brilliant global journey Claire Messud creates with Gaston and Lucienne Cassar. The Cassars, deeply in love, find separation from each other painful as Gaston is in the French Navy and Lucienne is trying to parent her children in Algeria. The Cassar family story takes us worldwide, moving for almost a century. They become a family without an actual, natural home to comfort them. The family and their offspring make the best of each situation, but home is an elusive fantasy that will forever elude them. I felt particularly stirred by this story as it contains personal elements.

The heft of Wolf at the Table and This Strange Eventful History gave me so much to reflect on, consider, and learn from. I am in awe of these authors and their work.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of these books.

Wolf at the Table was published on March 19, 2024, by Little, Brown, and Company.


This Strange Eventful History will be published on May 14, 2024, by W. W. Norton & Company.

This novel is a saga of three generations of Catholic family from upstate New York beginning in 1951 and ending in 2010. Each of them is touched in various ways by murder and the dysfunction of their relationships with one another. The tale is murky, gloomy and violent but I found the story and characters, as well as the well-crafted prose to be a compelling read.

** spoiler alert ** Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for providing an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Wow, this book took me for a ride. It was not what I expected. It could also be named "The Larkin Family and all the psychopathic killers around them."
The book covers 60 years in the history of the Larkins, a middle-class family with six children. We see the kids grow up and go through life while dealing with some major challenges. Lots of character development, mental illness discussion, serial killings, and some pretty messed up stuff. (would you mail your mother your poop or all of your teeth? how about both?)
If you like true crime and serial killer lore, you will particularly enjoy it, but the book is not really about the crimes and criminals. I think it is more about what makes people do horrible things and how often ordinary citizens come in contact with killers and molesters without knowing it, and how the "ordinary citizens" sometimes end up being monsters.

Starting in the summer of 1951, this book follows the Larkin family through to today. The four siblings - Myra, Alec, Lexy and Fiona - take us through their lives as they take drastically different paths.

This is a long book that is in turn interesting and dull. The random "famous people" the siblings interact with felt comical to me at times and overall, I did not feel like it added anything to the story. The story itself had a lot of promise, but it just felt too long at times.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for providing me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Available March 19, 2024.

Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp ⭐️⭐️💫

I’m pretty mixed on how I feel about this one. I oscillated between interested and bored/cringe. I struggled with the usage of some wording and cringed often even if it was true to the times. Think of every word or description that might’ve been used at one point that is not politically correct now and know that it’s in this book for seemingly no reason. I didn’t feel these instances provided any meaningful insight to plot or characters, and it was more distracting to me.

The description boasted this book as a “harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst…” Because of this, I was expecting a more on the nose story about just that. However, this book was more nuanced; the author was more focused on the exploration of how close we all come to danger regularly.

This novel could’ve been edited down a lot and still got its point across. The author liked to over describe, which left this book feeling very character heavy without significant growth or plot points. I will give credit as every time I was getting really bored, the author would reign it back in and grab my attention again, which kept me reading.

If you like multigenerational sagas spanning several decades, heavy character driven novels, or books that are more nuanced, this might be a hit for you.