The Dogs...Barking - Jan Notzon

The Dogs...Barking is the story of Jason Kelly, a boy growing up in a sleepy little town on the Mexican border in the conformist 1950s. As he grows into a man, he must battle the demons his nature and upbringing have instilled in him. It is a time and culture in which trauma and abuse were things too shameful to mention.

From childhood to adolescence and beyond, always in the back of his mind is the desperately lonely sound of the dogs barking in the distance as he lay in bed courting sleep. Now that sound is the ever-present reminder of his own disaffection. It blinds him to the genuine love of his ever-faithful friend, Kathryn, who yearns to be so much more.

As a young man, he is thrown into the maelstrom of university life in the wild-eyed, rebellious ’60s, finding relief in the illusion of creating a utopia and the pretense of brotherhood that it engenders.

But as that idealism gradually fades, he finds a new false god. He graduates to the raw power of New York City, supplanting dreams of fame and the adoration of millions for those of creating the perfect society.

As those hopes in turn are thwarted and he finally returns home, bruised and beaten, he finds, to his astonishment, the answer in the very howl of the dogs that once serenaded him to sleep.