On Dogs by C. Mallon
Catastrophic and violent, C. Mallon’s debut novel, Dogs (Scribner, 2025), is littered with pink. Pink is an interior color here, less pillow, more brain, less bubblegum, more watered-down blood that someone is really, really trying to take care of. Pink is used 66 times in 208 pages, and most of these uses show us the tender and the grotesque housed together in a single object or piece of anatomy. In these thrumming, frequent swatches, we get flashes of the heart of this novel before its chest is fully cracked open. Dogs isn’t for everyone. It asks, more than once, What is the worst thing? And then it answers, as a howl from a neighboring yard might call out to your dachshund, which you desperately wish would go to sleep so that you could too. The echoing pink of Dogs is as bodily as it is artificial. From lips to gore to stuffed animal, from womb to bathroom tile, it signals to the reader right away that the idea of the body has broken free, leaked from the concrete bodies depicted. Here, the violent and the domestic show up in the same Pepto-Bismol hue; ultimately, they share more than color.
Dogs follows a team of high school wrestlers as they do everything but their team sport. They drive, drink, do drugs, and trace burning precipices of their hometown, Carbon, presumed to be in Wyoming. Mallon’s sentences are often as open and as brief as the mudroom to a childhood friend’s house, where you might stand, waiting to be let in deeper. One early barrage reads, “Tinder dry. August. Passing the matchbox between them like it was a dollar.” We get danger, we get fuel and ignition, and we get these bright cuts of phrases punching after one another. Danger is both currency and communication; it is passed from one boy to another. You get it: Something bad is coming, and it’s coming the whole time. In fact, it got here before the reader did, and it seeks to reproduce itself even more than people do.
Hal is our center, a boy who has both watched and made violence in a company of boys watching, making, and, sometimes, preventing violence. Everyone is matches passing each other back and forth. At their strongest, and arguably their best, this group of boys is one united entity. Hal looks at his friends in his kitchen and realizes, “I was only looking at myself in different costumes. We were soup.” This soup spends a lot of its time canned in a bad, unsafe car that begins the novel. Hal begins, “What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part.” They drink and drive, clash, fizzle, and scrape at the edges of one another’s physical, fiscal, and sexual lives. What we see when we see Hal is someone who is almost always leaving his home. The car helps with this. Hal goes out of his house and into the car as much as he can, and seems most able to breathe when he isn’t living where he lives, in more than one sense. The body was spilled out of itself long before we got here.
. . . . . .
Hal has adopted a conscious blindness to his origins, especially his physical ones. In the same kitchen where he feels like friend-soup, he looks at his mother and explains:
I didn’t see where my body had come from when I looked at her, and I didn’t like to look at her right on. It didn’t really matter at all. I figured everybody felt that way about their mother, somewhere, even if they didn’t know about it.
This mother is like a sun, too bright to look at directly, an origin who is, for Hal, often totally depersonalized. She is a critical source of life who is shown more overt affection by Hal’s friends than Hal himself ever can muster. A glare bounces off all her appearances.
It’s worth mentioning that looking at the pages of Dogs also involves looking at the glare of unbroken walls of text with only occasional section breaks and no chapters. The text is more of an onslaught than it is an episodic collection. It has sections the way soup has sections. There is very little relief, physically or literally. It’s also worth mentioning, again, that Dogs goes about as badly as it can. What’s the worst thing you think could happen? Yes. Aside from horror and catastrophe, what is offered by the architectural and actual brutalism of the unbroken pages? Well, there’s Hal and there’s Mallon, two voices who do make something gorgeous while they move in, around, and through abuse. I am grateful to say that Dogs dodges purely edgy darkness and doesn’t wield its bleakness as an identity. If anything, this is a novel about disidentification. Everything Hal gestures to as a way of identifying himself actually blitzes the borders of his individuality. He’s on a team, after all. They are one another. These are the boys. Then there are the dogs.
Tough Guy is Hal’s dog and one of the only living things in the book whose goodness fills Hal easily and all the way. To Hal, Tough Guy is a sun he can stare at without burning his eyes. He identifies with the dog smoothly and often.
I got down on the floor and put my forehead against Tough Guy’s forehead. I said, are you a dog, buddy, or are you a real man. Cody John said, he’s a real man. He said, you wouldn’t have asked him otherwise. I figured that was entirely true. I sat and watched Cody John crush a cigarette, real gentle, not ever splitting the weak paper, fine and bleached, feeling like Bible pages, and the filter of soft cotton, soon to be colored rot-dark from the hot smoke.
The prose is accessible and clear, but this moment shows us a few vital things that are attached to one another with complexity. Hal’s dog is almost a person to him, as close as he can get, and named accordingly. Hal is as close to a dog as he can get, crouched on the floor with the animal, as he will be later with a friend’s dog, also named person-like, Calvin. Last, physical touch dominates the communication that Hal feels he can meaningfully receive. He touches the dog to address it. His closest friend, Cody John, touches a cigarette with dexterity and restraint, and in that touch, the cigarette becomes almost holy to Hal. We see this marriage of dogs, touch, and divinity again as Hal hides from violence at a house party.
Julia’s dog was laying on his stomach on the floor under the kitchen table. I got down under the table and sat by him. I drew the tablecloth down and made us a cave. The floor was red tile. The grout was rough under the pads of my fingers. The tag on his collar said CALVIN. I figured maybe I could love on him and nobody would mind. I figured I could do that and I wouldn’t regret it tomorrow. My jaw was so tight I thought probably my molars would split up and shatter. I was looking in Julia’s dog’s big wet eyes. I was holding his velvet ears in both of my hands how you’d hold a divining rod.
The dogs of Dogs are what Hal uses to ground himself. Mallon shows us a person who, in animalizing his sense of self, does not lose humanity but gains some kind of physical, clean grace. In a novel with so much that gouges, dogs offer Hal devotion and divinity in a language he can both hear and speak through his hands. Hal’s compulsion for physical communication isn’t just canine but comes with him to every person with whom he tries to meaningfully connect.
When Hal attaches to Julia’s dog, he notes, “I turned around to Calvin. I could see his pink flesh through his coarse blonde hair.” When Hal manages to connect with a person, a teammate, he details:
Cody John put his fist up and his knuckles hit onto my cheekbone. Playfighting. I match his pressure, how Tough Guy would nudge his soft head into my open hand. We had been thrown off the parallel tracks. We would meet at some shadowy axis. I didn’t want it in words, how I knew what he’d said to me. What he’d said with his blonde, hallowed hands. I didn’t need that in words. I knew it already.
Blonde here is more hide, more skin, than hair. The best thing for Hal is animalizing himself to someone he knows and loves. Talking would ruin something. The writing, the nondiegetic sense of a narrated life, manages not to threaten this nonverbal communication. There is a kind of suspension of disbelief here that Mallon unfolds like a pocketknife: Mallon’s writing is not language to Hal; it’s thought, impression, and touch itself. The only other person Hal connects with, also through physicality (but not through touch) is Julie. Julie is a high school girl in free fall, a girl received almost only through sexuality, who seems stuck as a body. Hal describes her, too, with pinkness: “She had milk skin and kid wrists, so weak they were damn near pathetic to look at. She was cold all the time and her knuckles and soft nose were always a little raw, always a little pink.” Julie, Cody John, and dogs are the things Hal keeps staring at with the same compulsion that drives him to be unable to see himself as a person in and from his mother. (Hal’s father is barely mentioned until the novel is about seventy percent over. This tells without telling.) Somewhere in this trio of obsessions lies a way to know Hal himself.
To look at Hal, someone almost invisible who speaks very little and finds so much about himself to be unspeakable, we look at what his own eyes and thoughts repetitively rest on. Bundled together, pinkness and dogs and touch without destination coalesce into a portrait of what is wrong and what is right about Hal, who is constantly worried that something is irrevocably and incurably incorrect about his person. Mallon uses silhouette to reveal a face, avoidance as attraction, and negative space as its own environment. At its strongest, the potent soup of Dogs creates a place at the edge of a burning world inside a single boy. The texture of its sentences and the architectural brutalism of its unparagraphed prose leak beauty into terror. As the city of Carbon shows its sprawling, ragged industrial edges, the fractured concept of the body as a person sprawling across generations and competing acts of violence and creation.
It is hard to imagine dedicating a book with this amount of violence and abuse to someone, or even finding an epigraph to launch it. Yet Dogs has both. It opens with a line from William Carlos Williams’s poem “To Elsie,” announcing, “The pure products of America / go crazy — ” The book’s dedication reads, “For Ronan, who can’t read; you know it already.” These two bursts of writing undermine the notion that easy or written communication is enough. Dogs is almost a book against books, as a body might be against itself. Joining it by reading is being willing to follow this ride. The Williams poem ends, “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” So much of Hal is driverless wrestling, flailing for the speech needed to actually, completely leave his home without leaving himself. Along with the epigraph and dedication, Mallon includes generous, loving acknowledgments (a few pages long) and an author bio (just two sentences). There’s something funny, almost shocking about finding the sweet forthrightness of a dedication and acknowledgments in a book like this. It feels like discovering family photos out at a rager house party, a little Oh, of course, these are here too. People live here.
I’ve seen this book compared to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. I’m pleased to disagree with the idea that these two books work on the same project or the same suffering. While wildness and rage bound through this novel, the anger and accident born in Dogs feels leashed to a traceable and single reality. Cause and effect are present; you can feel the dominoes. Dogs shows a reader what its like for one’s agency to ricochet between too much and too little. At once physically powerful and impossibly soft in his ability to defend his life from harm, Hal juggles his strength between his own hands. He is not always a victim, and this is sometimes a problem. He is his dangerousness, and he is the person who endures it, shies from it, wishes it were not his. He is never without some power and at least some want to want to live.
The horrific and the beautiful are siblings in Mallon’s prose. Starlight modifies the metallic landscape of Carbon, and its boys are as stuck as they are free. And the dogs are all right. They are almost paragons of goodness, of relief, of speechless humanity. I feel safe telling you that the dogs begin and stay good. The pain depicted in Dogs is not unmitigated, and this might be both the great soreness and redemption of the book, which could have felt closer to exploitation in less nuanced, loving hands.
Meaningful, rich, and difficult love flexes in this novel. Pink lives in both its flowers and its fists as Dogs explodes the place where these two things meet. At this intersection, Mallon shows us how a body and its person divorce each other. Dogs is doomed. Its boys are doomed. Its animals offer brief interludes of affection and triumph, and the novel sails to its highest moments when its reader forgets they are reading words and instead gets to feeling the howl baying at the back of the writing. Mallon’s ability to use language to prove that language can be a one-way street, insufficient for what must be communicated and returned, is gripping and nauseating and completely worth getting sick on, if you can. After all: Something is back there, barking near the dead end sign, needing no English to know its way home, to show you its want.
