Bark On
- 2023 INDIES Finalist
- Finalist, Literary (Adult Fiction)
Bark On is Mason Boyles’s free-ranging, fanciful novel about the complex dynamics and extreme training regimen of two triathletes.
Benji, a scandalized former Olympic trainer, recruits and coaches endurance athletes for Ironman competitions in a desolate town on the Carolina coast. A dungeon master with a mullet, he uses intense, unorthodox techniques, such as strapping athletes to the back of his truck for a run. Training with him are eighteen-year-old Casper and twenty-five-year-old Ezra; both struggle for their identities and direction. Their relationship is tenuous: Ezra is threatened by Casper’s youth and talent and uncertain of his motives. Eventually they are joined by Ezra’s mother—herself an ultra-endurance athlete with a long bucket list of achievements. The three form a makeshift “four-pack of a family.” Their hard-driving regimen has life-changing consequences, however, during the Chapel Hill Ironman competition.
The chapters alternate between people’s singular perspectives; their thoughts are raw and shared in stream-of-consciousness style. For instance, Benji considers how his uncle drove him to “nerve-know the solipsis of exhaustion…when your body becomes the world of hurt.” Casper, smart but illiterate, speaks in his own improvised language: “My voice sharps out screamy,” he notes when a workout goes awry. Every sentence, every paragraph, is dense with inventive language. A simple gesture like typing on a cell phone is shown as someone “drizzl[ing their] thumbs over the keypad” and spilling digits “like rain ponds in a ditch.”
Bleak descriptions of the isolated island setting are integral to the story. Packs of coyotes roam it, and the sunrise “congeals” on the boardwalk and storm-shuttered condos like “amber preserving the bones of a beached sea beast.” Driven by uncanny energy and imagination, Bark On is a gripping and insightful novel set among endurance athletes who seek acceptance and a family.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
