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A Novel
by C. Mallon
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Withdrawn and reticent, Hal is haunted by the specter of violence.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.
"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 a thoroughly heartbreaking story, but Mallon's moody and sinewy prose is the main event. This one hits hard." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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
This information about Dogs was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
C. Mallon is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
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