Verwandte Artikel zu Dogs: A Novel

Dogs: A Novel - Softcover

Mallon, C.

 
9781668084434: Dogs: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668084430 ISBN 13: 9781668084434
Verlag: Scribner, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
Winner of the New Harmony Book Award

“One of the most intense—and often enjoyable—reading experiences I’ve had this year. I will surely be inhaling whatever C. Mallon writes next.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The New York Times Book Review

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Withdrawn and reticent, Hal is haunted by the specter of violence.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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C. Mallon is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and resides in the midwestern United States.  

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
Winner of the New Harmony Book Award

“One of the most intense—and often enjoyable—reading experiences I’ve had this year. I will surely be inhaling whatever C. Mallon writes next.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The New York Times Book Review

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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. My friend Dylan bought it used. He got it off a guy called Styrofoam Bob. Bob was this great big autistic kid living in his parents’ converted garage on the west side of town. He was probably in his mid-thirties but everybody would tell you that he had the mental capacity of a little kid. I didn’t think that was true at all. I hadn’t ever understood that. Bob had dropped out of the high school. People were ugly to him there. It made him afraid. For a long time he would only go out at night. You’d see him walking out late in the neighborhood, big gumdrop body, top-heavy, that weird, goofy way that he walked with his knees locked. Broad hands held out right in front of him, cut up in streetlight, making shadow puppets on the split cement and talking to nobody, all by himself, all the time. Kids throwing trash from their scrapped sedans. Kids shrieking terrible things at him. Bob’s mother got him a job, how she wanted him back in the daylight. He worked part-time at the big-box store out by the mall complex, stacking steel shelves too high up for a regular man to reach, bagging the groceries, cautious and totally thoughtful. He did a really good job. His mother drove him there three days a week and his mother would pick him up after. You’d see him waiting on her, sat cross-legged on the curb in his work shirt and his big jeans, sneakers come untied and shoelaces dragging in the dry dirty gutter. I would see her around sometimes. I thought about her sometimes. I thought she had to be so tired. Somebody got to Bob when there was nobody watching him. Somebody sold him the car in bad faith. That was a cruel thing. They cleaned him right out of his savings. He paid what they wanted in cash. It hurt me to think about that. I figured it must’ve been a true blessing for Bob anyhow. Nobody watching him. Something he bought just because he was wanting it, and he had money, he’d worked for that money, and all of his money belonged to him. The car belonged to him. Bob loved the car like nobody had ever loved something before. You’d see him washing it out on his driveway. Dish soap and warm water, big yellow sponge looking just like a regular sponge in his big hands. His hands were always chapped bad from the time that he spent on the car. Anytime he closed his fist tight the knuckles would split up and bleed. He chewed and he gnawed on the pink, itching canyons forged into his quilt skin. His hands looked like hamburger meat. Bob had a lot of sensory problems. He couldn’t stand the grease feeling of all the petroleum jelly smeared onto his skin. They’d spread it on him just like it was peanut butter. It got to be so bad that his mother had to take him to the family doctor. Goldfish and rainbow aquarium gravel. Crayons in the waiting room. She had them slather Bob’s raw hands in lanolin cream and then bind his hands up in long yards of white gauze and tough, flesh-colored medical tape. They sent him back out on the world with his fists tied, the heavyweight champion, nothing won, and he cried hard, and they gave him a grape sucker. Whatever Bob had to give he gave it to the car. It was a bad machine. Brittle and cheap as a tin rocket, inches from rattling red bright combustion. Big boxcar body the color of rough rust and vaulted up off of the axles. It leaked exhaust into itself. You had to drive it with all of the windows down. Both of the driver’s side doors were the wrong color and the suspension was shot. Anytime Dylan hit a ragged, cut-up stretch of road he would hit his head hard on the ceiling. The model had been discontinued. The manufacturer issued a national recall. Anytime somebody crashed it everybody died. I had seen it on the news. Two kids in Colorado left their high school graduation, took the canyon road, headed for some party in somebody’s father’s cabin, and the brakes failed on the mountain highway. They must have been doing eighty-five by the time they struck the power line and rolled, the downed cables still live and binding the car in a tensile cradle, the drag and the spark, and their shirts and hair catching a flame how dry tinder would, tin roof clipped free by their dumb, dark inertia, the driver’s left arm, class ring still on the pointer finger, laying chewed on the median, roughly severed at the shoulder socket joint. Probably carrion birds on the blue sky. None of that was a problem for Bob. He had epilepsy. He was mentally retarded. He hadn’t ever learned how to drive. You’d only ever see Bob hose the bodywork down, work grit out of the treads with a soft-bristle toothbrush or get up on top of the hood with his legs folded, hitting his kneecaps and rocking his body forward, smearing his wet nose upward with his first finger knuckle. Whatever got him to feel good. Bob would sit out on the driveway and talk to the kids and the dogs on the street. Sometimes the fathers would come by and talk with him. Sometimes they’d bring him a bottle of turtle wax, torque wrench, they’d pop the hood for him and look at the spark plugs. Sometimes the mothers would come by and say, how are you doing, Bob, how’s your mom. You’d figure people would be cruel but they mostly weren’t. Mostly they showed him a lot of grace. He was a paperweight. He was a mascot. Even still, Bob’s mom and dad were pretty well inconsolable. They figured sometime he’d get restless and take the car out while they slept. They’d taken to putting the headlights on while Bob was sleeping to run the car battery flat. Somebody always took pity on him, and they’d jump it for him, and his mom and dad would execute the whole sad fraud again until they told him that he really had to put it up for sale. Bob wouldn’t eat for a while about it. You’d see him at the store, stood by the counter with his heart so entirely broken. That was a really sad thing. Bob made the flyers himself and he tacked them up all over town. They said the car had to go to somebody who’d love it for real. They said the price was negotiable. Dylan found the flyer stapled up on some rotted utility pole by the wrestling gym. He tore the printer page, sun-brittle, weakened by weather, down from in between the lost dogs and the garbage thrash bands. He made the long walk to Bob’s faded suburb alone and caught under the black wretched heat of that Indian summer. Dylan smoking, Dylan sweating his shirt through with his foam orange headphones playing punk rock music for him all the time. When I thought about that I could see him do it. Caged in by chain-link, the overpass bridge on the interstate, red eye of October sun open, soldering all the straight lines of his body out. Pausing for red licorice and a cold soda down at the corner store. Dylan found the brick house with the peach pink tulips wilting in the window. Flyer gone damp in his hand, creases shredding how cut cotton would. He went up and knocked on the rusted blue metal garage door. Bob came out, blinking his eyes hard and closing his big fists tight, splaying his fingers back out in a pink baby starfish. Dylan shook Bob’s broad hand, held out the flyer and asked if the car was for sale. Bob said it was, for sure, took the keys out of his back pocket and put them right into Dylan’s hand. Dylan had to have been the first person to come by and look at the car. Any other man would’ve put it in gear and left town. I figure he went through his options. I figure he thought about that really hard. Dylan walked back down the driveway. He got in the driver’s side door and he fit the key into the chrome plate ignition. He punched his tough hands up onto the ridged plastic wheel, and the dash, and he rubbed at his eyes with his...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668084430
ISBN 13 
9781668084434
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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