Excerpt from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Howl Palace was still beautiful, in my mind. And could be to other people, given the right welcome. Silver had said to just relax, to let her finesse the details, but buyers needed to experience how the house would feel if they lived in it—friends coming over, kids in the backyard pitching mud chunks at mallards, a little music going on the speakers. I went to the locker freezer and pulled out fifty pounds of caribou burger, plus four dozen moose dogs. All we needed now were a few side dishes. And some buns.


THE NEXT MORNING WAS BUST a hump. The menu for the cookout had expanded to include green bean casserole, macaroni salad, guacamole, and trout almondine. Trout almondine requires cream for the cream sauce, which I forgot on my eight-thirty run to Costco, leading me to substitute powdered milk mixed with a few cans of cream of mushroom soup. My fifth husband, Skip, used to call me the John Wayne of the Home Range, not in the nicest way, until he got dementia and forgot who I was or that he had to follow me around explaining how I'd organized the produce drawer wrong or let too much hair fall off my head in the shower or failed to remove every single bone from his barbecued salmon because I didn't fucking ever think. Shipping him off to a facility in Washington near his daughter wasn't exactly something I struggled with.

The pool table, where I planned to lay out the buffet, was coated with so much dust it looked as though a fine, silver fungus had sprouted over the felt. I dragged an old quarter sheet of plywood from the snow-machine shed and heaved it on top. If you are looking for a reason to split five cords of wood by hand each year for forty-odd years, consider my biceps at age sixty-seven.

The air had the bright, whistly feel of coming cold. Even as the grass on the back lawn lay in drunken clumps, flattened by twenty-hour days of summer sunlight. Out in the garage, I found a flowery top sheet from a long-gone water bed. That went over the pool table. Soon followed the side dishes, the salads, the condiments. On went the grill, the meat at the ready on the little side table that folded up, with an indentation to rest your tongs and spatula. All that was left was the guacamole. Which was when Carl's pickup pulled into the driveway.

Carl wasn't my husband. Carl was the beautiful, bedeviling heartbreak of my life. His hair had thinned, but not so you saw his scalp, and age spots mottled his arms. His smell was the same as ever: WD-40, line-dried shirt, the peppermint soap he used to cut through fish slime. For one heady second, I believed he had come back to say in some soft, regretful voice: Remember when we ran into each other at Sportsman's Warehouse? It got me thinking, well, maybe we should give it another try.

As Carl told me long ago, "Inside you hides a soft, secret pink balloon of dreams." He wasn't incorrect, but the balloon had withered a little over the years. And it was not a reassuring sign that Carl had a dog in the back of his vehicle.

"I thought you might need a new Lab," he said. "She's pedigree, real obedient."

I had some idea what he meant: She jumped ducks before he got off a shot and went after half-dead birds in the rapids despite the rocks he threw at her backside, trying to save her from injury. Once, she had eaten a healthy portion of his dishwasher.

Over my years at Howl Palace, I'd had a lot of dogs, all of them black Labs with papers proving their champion field-and-trial bloodlines. I loved every one of them and loved hunting with them, but no matter how you deal with these animals at home—stick or carrot—they just can't deviate from the agenda panting through their minds, an agenda born of instinct and inbreeding, neither of which suggests that they sit there wagging their tails when a bumblebee flies through a yard. Or a bottle rocket zooms by.

I have seen my share of classic family retrievers on this lake—black or yellow Labs, dumb, drooling goldens, the occasional hefty Chessie—who live only to snuggle up with the kids and ignore the smoked salmon you are about to insert into your mouth. But I have never had one in my kennel or my house. My last dog, Babs, was a hunt nut, willful, with a hole in her emotional reasoning where somebody yanked out her uterus without a fully approved vet license. I picked her up for free from an ad in the Pennysaver, and maybe that had something to do with it. She drowned after jumping out of a charter boat to retrieve the halibut that I had on the line, unaware of the tide about to suck her into the Gulf of Alaska.

Excerpted from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman. Copyright © 2022 by Leigh Newman. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.