Dogs by C. Mallon
Reviewed by Rachel Shaver
11/26/25
“There was something really unpleasant about anything that ever got me to feel good. I figured getting around to being a man was all about refusing to let the bad part throw you off. Getting around to being a man was all about letting it hurt you. All that you had to do was take it.”
From the first page, Dogs announces itself as a tragedy. We are told something terrible has happened, that we will see it unfold over the next two hundred pages, and then forced to wait for the full heartbreaking story to reveal. In the meantime, C. Mallon gives us Hal, a teenage boy in a small town searching for some version of himself that he can live with. Hal is the kind of character that immediately gains your trust. He’s an observer, both of his group of friends and of himself. He does not spare any detail, because he does not feel he is owed the mercy of a sugarcoated telling of the life he has lived. In his honesty though, we come to see the unreliability in his narrative, the way his past has shaped him to see the world as one bad thing after the next.
“I had gone wrong somewhere. There was no fixing that. There was no turning away from it. I wore it under my shirt. Caught in the wrong type of light you could see it glitch. Dark halo. Frail splinter hologram. I didn’t like to look anybody in the face for too long, how I hated to see it there. I was afraid that I’d see it there. Somewhere I was always afraid.”
Dogs is not an uplifting story. In fact, it was something closer to a nauseating spiral into a darkness that feels too intense to be possible for one character to endure. But there is a profound beauty in the prose that comes from Mallon’s stream-of-consciousness style writing. Hal is the light that carries the reader through the pages. There are no chapter breaks, no paragraph breaks, just Hal and the reader from start to finish, like a slow tour of his psyche. It’s an incredibly hard undertaking to write a book so drenched in tragedy without losing the reader along the way, and I think for some, Dogs is going to be hard to get through. But Mallon is intentional with Hal’s story. This is not merely for shock value. Hal’s past is obscured to us for much of the novel, but when it comes out, it’s not exactly a surprise. Hal is different, this he knows too well. But he’s such a vivid character. His relationships are so real, so true to what you’d expect from a group of boys on a wrestling team who spend most of their time together doing drugs and drinking until they can’t stand up straight.
What allows Dogs to exist in its sadness is the beauty of the prose, the way Hal sees the world and truly understands the people around him. Mallon’s style is one that comes off more as poetry than prose, steeped in rich images that fold into Hal’s memories and his keen eye for the world around him.
Central to the story is one relationship that comes onto the page almost immediately. Where Hal is our light through the book, Hal’s closest friend, Cody John, is what carries him through the entirety of his story. There is an intimacy between them that goes beyond just friendship, a tenderness neither boy has the language to name. Cody John is the only one who truly sees Hal, the one who senses the unspoken parts of him, the lingering grief and the self-hatred he tries to hide. Through their closeness, Mallon explores the complexity of boyhood and masculinity and how it all collides in this novel in a tender but powerful way.
“The coming apart was so much more complicated than the coming together.”
Threaded throughout is Hal’s appreciation for dogs, namely Tough Guy, his childhood dog who he feels an intense connection with. Through Hal’s view of Tough Guy, we glimpse what he wants to believe about goodness. To Hal, dogs are what humans cannot be. Innocent, loyal, unashamed. They find no guilt in protecting themselves. His love for them is almost spiritual; it’s a desperation to be something other than himself, something that does not concern itself with all the tragedies he’s endured.
“He was this great big and brutal dog, big evil teeth and big cranium built out of wrought iron, galvanized, inches thick. I read somewhere how a grizzly bear could stop a bullet in motion with nothing but its frontmost skull. Lead lodged forever in the creamy frontal bone under the greased fur and the thick fat. Tough Guy was a lot like that. He was my dog.”
What makes Mallon’s novel remarkable is how it manages to avoid sentimentality, allowing instead for a raw, honest depiction of grief to take its natural form. The novel’s lack of structure and wandering narration becomes the architecture of a truly haunting book. Dogs leaves a mark that lingers long after the final page. There is beauty in the darkness, and by the end, the beauty is the only mercy Mallon offers us.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Bleak but beautiful, a rare novel that treats trauma with honesty rather than spectacle. For readers who want to fall in love with messy characters with messier backstories. Be prepared to cry.
About the reviewer:
C. Mallon is the author of Dogs, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
About the reviewer:
Rachel Shaver graduated from Eckerd College with a BA in creative writing and a minor in literature. She lives in Tampa, Florida with her twin sister and spends her days consuming media in all forms. She has been published in Collision Literary Magazine and worked as editor-in-chief for Eckerd Review, as well as editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine
