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Justin Torres's debut novel arrives in a form that feels almost impossibly compact - 125 or so pages of discontinuous vignettes that somehow carry the weight of a full-length bildungsroman. It is the story of three brothers growing up half-white, half-Puerto Rican in rural upstate New York in the 1980s, raised by parents who had them as teenagers and who love each other with a violence that is sometimes indistinguishable from the violence that erupts around the house. Paps hits Ma. The boys hit each other. And yet beneath the chaos is an intense, almost suffocating unity - the feral collective of the title, the "we" that will eventually have to fracture.

What strikes hardest is the prose. Torres writes in short, muscular sentences that pummel and then suddenly lift into something close to poetry. The repetitions are incantatory, the consonants crowd together, and the sentences leap without ever showing off for the sake of it. The opening paragraph alone - the boys banging forks, wanting more volume, more riots, more rock - sets a rhythm that the rest of the book sustains. It is closer to prose poetry than to conventional fiction, and the vignette structure reinforces that: memory arrives in flashes, not in tidy chronology, and Torres trusts the reader to assemble the shape of the family from the fragments.

The real power of the book lies in how it refuses the easy binaries. The parents are abusive and tender, often in the same scene. The boys are savage and devoted. Love here is a dangerous thing that makes and unmakes the family many times over, and Torres renders it without sentimentality and without the reflexive condemnation a lesser writer might have reached for. The mother, in particular, emerges as the novel's quiet centre - a "confused goose of a woman" who loses track of the days, who alternates between gruff and matter-of-fact, and whose unhappiness gives the book much of its ache.

It isn't a flawless debut. The lyricism occasionally tips into overwriting, and the titular metaphor gets hammered a little too insistently - yes, they are animals, we understood that on page one. The ending, which pivots suddenly toward the narrator's sexuality and his separation from the pack, has struck some as melodramatic or too abrupt, a tonal shift that the rest of the book hasn't quite earned. There is a case to be made that the fragmentary form, beautiful as it is, can't quite carry the weight of what the final pages are trying to do.

Still, those reservations feel minor against what Torres accomplishes. This is a coming-of-age novel that reinvents its genre by compression rather than expansion, a book that reads in one sitting and lingers for weeks. It announces a genuine voice - one that The New York Times subsequently ranked among the best fiction of the century's first quarter, and one that would go on to win the National Book Award for Blackouts in 2023. As debuts go, it is a small, dark jewel of a thing. Read it twice; it asks to be reread.