Dogs
A Novel
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“One of the most intense—and often enjoyable—reading experiences I’ve had this year. I will surely be inhaling whatever C. Mallon writes next.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The New York Times Book Review
A singular, devastating debut novel, Dogs traces the fallout of one catastrophic night in the lives of five high school wrestlers, asking what can survive in the blast radius of latent trauma and violence.
As night falls on the city of Carbon, Hal and his friends are cruising the backroads in their terrible car. From the wrestling gym to the gas station, from his mom’s kitchen to the mall parking lot, Hal bears quiet witness to the beauty and the horror he perceives in the slow, lonely world of his hometown.
Withdrawn and reticent, Hal is haunted by the specter of violence. Safety and comfort are hard won in Carbon, a town dogged by stories of desperation and brutality, and his own home is a dark vault of troubled and unspoken memory. Hal’s greatest peace is found in the company of his dearest friend, Cody John, whose true compassion offers him a window to a better life.
Over the course of a single night, a catastrophic chain of events is set into motion. Its devastating conclusion will explode the fragile balance that once kept the boys together. Unflinching, resolute, and beautifully rendered, Dogs is a stunning exploration of trauma, real love, and the limit of our ability to reach one another.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Five high school wrestlers attempt to navigate life and their personal traumas in this intense and emotional literary debut. Hal never considered himself especially violent, but an outburst in the school cafeteria left him shaken and looking for an outlet, so he joined the wrestling team, forming a bond with four other wrestlers. The five boys spend much of their time cruising the streets in their friend’s clunker, until one fateful incident leaves them all questioning their friendship. Author C. Mallon’s prose moves at a frenzied pace, a poetic stream of consciousness that captures the teenage boys’ internal struggle with masculine expectations and how past traumas inform their choices. We found ourselves empathizing with the boys, especially Hal and Cody John, yet not quite understanding their motivations until a brutal finale reveals the truth behind their struggles. Dogs is a sledgehammer of a novel, fast and brutal and incredibly affecting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this raw and brilliant debut novel, C. Mallon traces the late teen years of Hal and his group of misfit friends, wrestlers who mainly smoke, drink, and take any drug available to ease their feelings of irrelevance and isolation. It's set in the rough backwater of Carbon (which appears to be in Wyoming) in the days when cassette players were still in cars and "pine walls twitched virtual seafoam green-blue with the cathode ray light" of a tube set. Hal and his friends operate out of view from adult supervision even when the parents are nearby, as when his mom leaves an ashtray on a window ledge so the boys can smoke outside. They are reticent and disconnected, and they often engage in rough horseplay while hiding their real emotions. Hal, confused and possessed by violent outbursts (in the eighth grade, he punched a kid "so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty"), struggles to connect with anyone, and holds close to sensitive friend Cody John. One night while the two are wasted on a mountain turnout above their town, Hal confesses the buried trauma that's made him who he is, setting into motion a blur of events that leads to tragedy. It's a thoroughly heartbreaking story, but Mallon's moody and sinewy prose is the main event. This one hits hard.
Customer Reviews
Masterpiece
The best book I read in 2025. Brilliant, bleak, and beautiful.