Dogs is both a fall and a rise: two motions triggered by ravenous rage and self-turning anguish. It’s the thud of collapse and the snap of recoil. And yet, like any creature hounded by the echo of its own snarl, the narrative holds a tender, brutalized heart.
Set over the course of a single night in a town hollowed by absence and dusk, Dogs follows a teenage wrestler and his friends as something already fractured—and still fragile—begins to splinter further.
Central to the story is the charged, complicated bond between Hal and his dearest friend, Cody John—one shaped by unspoken need and the harsh realities of a world edged with violence. What unfolds is a detonation of relationships, perceptions, and lives: slow, intimate, and inevitable.
This unraveling isn’t explosive so much as cumulative. The novel descends, sled-like, down a ridge: gradual at first, then inescapable. The language lands with a brutal punch.
Staccato sentences.
Sharp images that rip through the narrative veil, snagging a gaze already drawn by the pulse of words that fixate. Punctuation turns into a panting dog.
The volley of text, uncut and spaceless, reveals a jaw torn wide. Dialogue—shoved into the narrative body and stripped of protective quotation marks—becomes a steaming breath against mashed knuckles.
Repeated syntactical shapes gnaw at the bone like muscle memory turned violent. The effect is dissociative and unforgiving. Brutal. Intoxicating.
Tension turns rabid, tearing into your gut. When the devastation arrives—foretold in every jolt down the slope of Dogs’ violent frenzy—it's both silencing and inevitable. Even as the pages bleed with violence, your response may be quieter: fragile, ruptured.
The novel’s physicality—the way emotion becomes flesh—is certainly striking. Pain and desire are rendered not as ideas but as spasm, contact, muscle: raw and involuntary. The body doesn’t shield the self; it absorbs what remains once the self is stripped away.
We find that a teenage touch can ache with want or mark the moment before it consumes itself. You can maim and love. You can love and still destroy.
Dogs is very much a story you endure: a relentless surge of cruelty and language that tears through you, leaving something raw and unnerved in its wake.
Every jagged sentence cuts, carving a place where love clashes with violence, and tenderness bleeds through: where survival becomes its own undoing. In the end, Dogs devours, gnawing at your insides long after the final page is turned.
An advance copy was provided by Scribner.
Mood Meter
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Genres
General Fiction (Adult)
LGBTQ+
Publication Date
August 12, 2025