DOGS

Five teenage boys come of age together, mostly experiencing the worst life has to offer.

In a small city called Carbon, Hal, Carter, Cody John, Zachary, and Dylan are on the high school wrestling team. Most of the time they spend together outside of wrestling involves driving around in Dylan’s decrepit car and consuming drugs and alcohol. Hal, the narrator, is prone to dark thoughts and fixations on the litany of tragedies that have occurred in their town. He understands that he’s different from others, including his friends: “I had gone wrong somewhere. There was no fixing that.” Hal’s loathing is largely reserved for himself but not always; he got into wrestling after an incident in eighth grade when he beat another student so badly that the kid “looked majorly deformed.” Amid their roughhousing and drinking and this bleakness, the boys show affection in their own ways, and Cody John and Hal are especially tender to one another. In a moment of watching his friend, Hal thinks, “If I had only had eyes for one thing then it would have been Cody John, stood on the borderline, cradled in stars with his body whole.” On one particularly charged night, the boys drive out to a place “tucked under the summit of the mountain,” where something occurs that will destroy their lives. Mallon employs an unquestionably unique writing style in this debut novel; Hal narrates in plenty of short, blunt sentences (“Everything he did he hit it too hard. I understood that. I knew all about that”), but some of the language, while interesting, is embellished slightly past its peak (“Styrofoam beads torn away by the warm wind to pack out the cracks in the concrete”). This is an intense, bleak tale that gets even darker after its turning point. Readers (especially sensitive ones) should approach this powerful novel with care, exploring as it does the troubled bonds we hold dear and the traumatic events that people, even and especially younger people, can endure.

A novel of almost depthless darkness and a show of significant talent.