Anger is a messenger. In Rachel Yoder’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Nightbitch, the protagonist’s anger is a relentless messenger, a primal drumbeat. It pushes as she fumbles to hear it, channel it and follow it to unimagined possibilities.

Nightbitch tells the story of a woman who becomes convinced she is turning into a dog. It is disturbing, funny, gripping and possibly prophetic.

We meet the protagonist two years into an exhausted motherhood. The feeding, changing, bedtimes, endless hours of playing trains and reading about trains and watching trains feel as if they have drained all intelligent thoughts from her head. Her loneliness is palpable, her exhaustion real.

The mother sees only two possible identities. As a successful artist, she tried to be the hold-it-all-together Working Mother. But in utter fatigue she quit and sank into stay-at-home motherhood. She loves her child dearly. She sees the miracle in their bond. But she cannot be the contented, selfless All Things Mommy.

The mother’s road to salvation is her anger. One night, her rage reaches the surface as her child persistently cries and her husband persistently does not help. The next morning, she finds a patch of dark fur on the back of her neck. Her canines prick her finger. She believes she is turning into a dog.

And so starts her journey of finding a third option, an unnamed identity. She continues to cook and clean and change and play while seeking any explanation for her increasing canine tendencies. A peculiar library book becomes a sort of sacred text. The Field Guide to Magical Women asks what the mother cannot yet speak: “To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings?”

As the mother tries to build friendships, stick to a schedule, be spontaneous, enrich her son’s life — anything that might help her navigate this upheaval — her anger keeps her from settling in and accepting the inauthentic. The mother does not run away from her life but dives down into it. In relationship with her son, her husband, former colleagues, other lonely moms and her animal nature, she begins to literally run free and make a new kind of art.

Though Nightbitch never mentions the word Mennonite, Anabaptists will recognize the ethos in the protagonist’s childhood. In a short, stark interlude to the narrative, the mother reflects on her past. She sees her own extraordinarily talented mother obediently working herself to the bone, stuck inside a very small world. She sees the cost of sacrificing the entire self for the community. She finally speaks in a prophetic voice of her own: “How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? . . . And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”

Anabaptists carry the gift and weight of obedience — to church, to family, to structure, to tradition, to expectation. But what happens when obedience equates with a misconstrued pacifism of never feeling our anger, never acting out? If generations of our women have not felt their anger, perhaps that anger has no choice but to lodge itself inside our very bodies. Nightbitch offers no answers and no road map. But it does give us one new story of a woman who finds freedom and meaning on the other side of rage.

Readers should be prepared for a bizarre novel steeped in magical realism. It includes brief mentions of sex, frequent strong language and detailed, disturbing descriptions of violence against animals.

Up through its stunning conclusion, Nightbitch is a searing offering — and an invitation to wonder: As outer horizons seem to collapse in motherhood, what inward horizons might expand? As The Field Guide asks, “Who is to say what wonders and mysteries women grow within themselves?” Nightbitch is a challenging and potent fable of a woman who integrates the animal within.

Anne Marie Hardy Spelman works as a homeschooling mother of three children, a spiritual director and a musician. She and her family attend First Mennonite Church in Bluffton, Ohio.