C. Mallon reveals the books, films, and music that inspired Dogs

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. Below Mallon offers the books, films, and music that inspired Dogs.

Dogs opens hard and fast with a junk car, a high school wrestler and a “great big autistic kid” named Styrofoam Bob.  My mentor, Ethan, would’ve told me that the narrator would never start the story there, not with Bob, not outside of the meat of the narrative, and I would’ve said, you’re so smart, and I love you to death, but I do what I want.  Once I got into the voice with the narrator, Hal, it was a heavy trip.  Writing it out was so dark and compelling but I was afraid of myself.  I was holding out on myself.  The first draft was incomplete, probably sixty-five pages and seventy-five percent of the narrative.  I had to step away from it for two years.  I suspected that the manuscript was in possession of some type of power that I didn’t understand.  I was disturbed by that.  I’m still disturbed.  I started working on DOGS again in the fall of 2023.  I found a darker, more troubled Hal waiting for me.  I took myself to punishing extremes, mentally, physically.  I figured that, if I was going to write that extremity, I had to feel that extremity, too.  I’m still trying to figure out how to do meaningful work without leaving my guts on the floor.  I figure that’s the question at the sad center of all of it.  How to stay steady on the flat part of the blade with the sharp half, right there, blue and blinding in the sunshine.

“Farewell Transmission” by Jason Molina and Songs, Ohia

A tough contender for the greatest song ever written, “Farewell Transmission “has followed me around from project to project and highway to highway.  Jason Molina comes in with those staggering opening lines.  The whole place is dark.  Every light on this side of the town.  It’s so simple.  It grounds you immediately in whatever you need to understand about this small universe.  When you can achieve power and meaning with total economy, total control, that’s the crux.  That’s transubstantiation.  You’ve built something out of nothing.  You’ve turned water into blood.

Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders

I took two screenwriting seminars while I was getting my bachelor’s degree.  Both were revolutionary with regard to my capacity as a writer.  I hadn’t really understood narrative before.  My professor, Michael, gave us an assignment; write a short screenplay for a Western.  He’d always give us a lot of creative freedom to interpret the directive however we wanted, which was good, because I was twitchy.  I hated to feel constrained.  Michael played us the opening of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.  I sat in a stiff chair and watched, rapt, as Harry Dean Stanton walked out of a red desert on the screen.  I figured it was the greatest ten minutes of film ever made.  I think about it all the time.  I didn’t see the whole of the movie for another three or four years.  I didn’t know what it was about.  I only wanted to write the red rock and the blue sky.  Blue sky.  

Period by Dennis Cooper

I’ve read Period probably three or four times.  It’s a tough book to describe.  I like Dennis Cooper a lot.  I’ve read all of The George Miles Cycle.  I’ve read The Sluts.  I’ve read My Loose Thread, twice.  All of Cooper’s work is transgressive.  All of it’s brutal.  Period confounds and bothers me.  It’s a spiritual text.  Outside of the damned town, hid in the woods, there’s a regular suburban house painted entirely black on the inside.  It’s a monument to a dead lover.  It might unspool you if you linger too long.  There’s a heavy metal band in a panel van.  They murder this kid.  We adopt his perspective as he bleeds out on the side of the dirt road, hearing the van drive away.  Dumped like trash.  Period is a cruel masterpiece.  Cooper is unabashedly, powerfully, terminally himself.  I wish that I was that way all the time.

I Dream a Highway by Gillian Welch

The whole of Gillian Welch’s 2001 record Time (The Revelator) ought to be etched onto solid gold and shot into space like the Voyager 1 probe.  I think she ought to be canonized, lionized, witnessed and lauded and high-fived.  I Dream a Highway is built out of aching, and yearning, and lyrics that’ll halt you where you stand.  John, he’s kicking out the footlights.  The Grand Ole Opry’s got a brand new band.  Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand.  In all of literature and of language, the thing that I wish I had written the worst is that dark prayer.  Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand.  Welch works effortlessly with character and convention.  Sunday morning at the diner.  Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears.  I watch the waitress for a thousand years.  Welch’s courageous insistence on imagery that the audience ought to wrestle with has given life to a brattier tendency within my own practice.  I watch the waitress for a thousand years.  It’s universal.  It’s lonesome.  I Dream a Highway is fifteen minutes long.  Every moment of it is vital, bleak, urgent.  We have all dreamed a highway.  We have all watched the waitress for a thousand years.  

The Moon and Antarctica by Modest Mouse

My dearest friend played me a handful of tracks from this record when I was probably seventeen.  I liked Wild Packs of Family Dogs a lot.  One night me, him and our sweet friend drank plenty of Bombay Sapphire gin, thick blue glass of the square bottle always so beautiful to me, trying hard to be quiet with his mom sleeping upstairs, and then we took a walk to the park in his dark, silent neighborhood.  It was the summertime.  We had to creep through the carnival trailer homes.  Me and our sweet friend were smoking Rothman cigarettes, the cheapest cigarettes that you could buy.  We lay down in the soft grass.  The stars made sense to me.  I felt like we were wild family dogs.  The most beautiful track on the record is Perfect Disguise.  I listen to it often and I think about my dearest friend.  It wakes up all the worst hurt in my heart.  Grief is to regular household love as tungsten steel is to pig iron.  It doesn’t compromise.  It won’t be bent.  You fight with it until you understand you have to work with it.  That’s all that I have to say.