The Underneath

The Underneath is a children's novel by the American writer Kathi Appelt, published in 2008 and set in the swamps along the border between Louisiana and Texas.

Ranger is a hunting dog who has been mistreated by the man he lives with and who spends his days waiting beneath a house that is falling apart. When a calico cat arrives and settles in the crawlspace under the floorboards with her kitten, Ranger permits it, even though any noise they make will bring the man down on all of them. The novel gives the animals their own points of view and their own histories, and it moves backward and forward in time to tell them. One strand follows Grandmother Moccasin, an enormous old snake who has lived in the bayou far longer than any of them and whose grievance shapes what happens to the cat and the dog. The setting does a great deal of the work here: heat, mud, water and cypress trees, and the sense of a place where people and animals are all living close to the edge of something.

Appelt wrote the book for younger readers, and its short chapters alternate between the present danger and the older story that explains it.