When I was seven, I felt so estranged from the rest of my weird family, I decided we couldn't possibly share the same mortal blood. Perhaps they were aliens, or maybe peasants, but definitely strangers. Had I been kidnapped? I set my sights on tracking down my true kin. No doubt I'd been separated from my real family by a terrible accident of fate--a rift in time, political exile, a witch's spell, the freezing hand of a malevolent spirit. I trusted that my lost relations desperately sought me too (this, according to my sources: Lang and Grimm fairy tales, Narnia and Oz books) for a grand palatial reunion. My actual family had to be rich, royal, and gifted with magic powers, for I was surely destined for finer, more fabulous things than cafeteria lunches, smocked dresses and roller skates. Only when I woke in a strange scary place after yet another radical sleepwalking stunt, my mother appearing like magic to hold and comfort me in the dead of night, did the familiar familial feelings return and snap me out of my princess fantasy. I recall thinking: Well, even if she isn't my real mother, she's awfully sweet to me so I'd better hang onto her for now.

Such is the theme of Scott O' Connor's wonderfully Grimm, compact novella, Among Wolves, although Blaylock, his protagonist, doesn't get off nearly as easy as I did. Revolving around a faux-Disney Florida theme park, the plot of Among Wolves takes off from the narrator's present reality as Diggity Dawg, one of many absurd, large-headed human animals running the daily kiddie show: Here among wolves, here among pigs. Here among dogs and pirates. Here among ghosts. Here among screaming children I sneak my first cigarette of the day.

As it happens, the theme park is one of the last places Blaylock feels sure he spent, er, quality time with his true family--before the imposters replaced his father, mother, and sister. Later, back at their dull, lower-middle-class Midwestern home, the boy utters the magic words I hate you! to his father, and nothing is ever the same. He feels terrible about his behavior and goes to the garage to apologize, but this is moment when it dawns on him something's terribly amiss. Like a jump-rope jingle incantation, O'Connor's simple prose mesmerizes and amuses, centrifuging the alien and the familiar till they become one and the same:

You know how if you say your name over and over again, after a while it stops making sense? It's not your word anymore. It's not a word at all anymore. It's just a meaningless sound. I was staring at him [my father] so hard in the garage, that's how he began to feel to me. He stopped making sense. Everything about him seemed strange.

O' Connor knows how to spin a tale, mixing toys with porn parlors. Sure enough, Blaylock's worst fears are not sufficiently paranoid. It's best not to reveal more, for this is a story that demands to be experienced viscerally. Analysis defeats its power; in tracing the main structural metaphor--smoke--I found interpretation rendered it lifeless, but the gut-level effect remains properly disconcerting.

I imagine that sooner or later, every child experiences that jarring family moment when his or her worst suspicions are confirmed, prompting the question, Who are these people? If there's any resolution to this merciless stripping away of life's masquerades, psychologists haven't yet stumbled upon it, but readers will have their own wolves in sheep's clothing to contemplate.