The Underneath
Kathi Appelt
 The Underneath is underneath the ramshackle house. Ranger can go there, but not much further, as he is chained, and never released, since his leg has been shot accidentally by his evil owner, Gar Face. He meets a calico cat who has kittens, and he names the kittens "Sabine" and "Puck". When Puck breaks the rule of going outside the underneath, bad things happen. There are important events going on beyond the house, in the bayou and swamps nearby, near the Texas-Louisiana border. Those events are related to others that happened a thousand years ago, when Grandmother, a cottonmouth water moccasin, and also a lamia, lost her only daughter to Hawk Man, another being who is part animal and part human, who became her daughter's husband. Grandmother was trapped in a clay jar because Hawk Man trapped her there, and has been thinking about that loss ever since. The Alligator King, who has grown to a hundred feet in length, has been around, thinking about these matters, for that seven thousand years, too. When storms release Grandmother, she decides to do something unexpected. She sees the love between the kittens and the hound, and frees Ranger. Although the kittens and the hound are now free, the calico cat had been drowned by Gar Face, who, himself, meets a bad end. The book also mentions the Caddo native Americans, who used to live in the area.