Dogs - by C Mallon

Book Synopsis

A devastating debut novel, "reminiscent of Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy" (The Washington Post), 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 cruise the backroads in a beat-up old 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. Safety is 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, exploding the fragile balance that once kept the boys together. Unflinching, resolute, and singular, Dogs is a "raw and brilliant" (Publishers Weekly) exploration of trauma, real love, and the limits of our ability to reach one another.

Review Quotes

"[A] visceral gut punch of a debut... Mallon's prose is clean and spare...[her] characters are intensely nuanced, rendered in turn poetic and dark, ruined and hopeful." --Booklist

"Propulsive and devastating." --Our Culture

"C. Mallon's work is equal parts scouring and clarifying, the kind of writing that exposes the wounds in order to irrigate them. Her characters are constitutionally unable to overlook the dirt and mess and pain of the world, yet haunted by the instinct that everything might have been some other way--on another planet, maybe, or in another life. Impairment, here, is a form of passion; transgression, a form of sanctitude." --Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

"A tour de force, both heartful and heartbreaking, C. Mallon's Dogs is a raw, beautiful excavation of the wounds blown open by the betrayal of life's most sacred relationships." --Daniel Magariel, author of One of the Boys

About the Author