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

Benny was a world-class outdoorsman and an old-school shotgunner who did not believe in pretending that everybody got to make it to old age. On trips he took without me, he always said, "Dutch, if I don't come back, hold tight to Howl Palace."

Four-plus decades later, I still had my property, and it had come at a sizable cost. Wallace put me through a court battle after I left him for Carl. RT needed an all-cash payment to make him run away to Florida. Add to that Lon's rehab and Skip's long-term care. The Cub and the 185 were gone, all the life insurance money, the IRA. Howl Palace was all I had left. And now I had to sell it in order not to die in a state nursing home, sharing a room with some old biddy who liked to flip through scrapbooks and watch the boob tube with the volume cranked up high.

You can't cry about these things. But you can't sit around and contemplate them either.

Luckily, Candace's youngest boy, Donald, turned up at the top of the stairs. His electronic slab was tucked under his arm. "Where's the charger, Mom?" he said.

"Donald," I said. "Let's go fish for a dog."

"Donald has asthma," said Candace. "He can't handle a lot of dander."

"Get your boots on, Don," I said. "You, too, Candace."

"Really?" she said. "I get to come? Do I get to see the wolf room, too?"

For all the obvious reasons, I didn't like people on drugs in the wolf room. Or people with drinks, food, or mental issues. Despite our friendship, Candace had never seen it. "If you help me with these safety caps," I said. "And fine-tune the dosage."


DONALD WAS A LITTLE WHEEZY fellow with glasses attached to a sporty wraparound strap. He knew how to hustle, though, and stuck to my side as I laid out the plan. Your mom's job, I said, is to crush up some medicine and roll the moose rib in it. Your job is to take the spin rod I give you and cast the moose rib at the end of the line into the bushes. Then slowly, slowly reel it in. The minute the dog bites on the rib, you sit tight, play her a little. We'll have only a few seconds for me to grab her by her collar. Then we'll stick her in the kennel with the rib. Nighty-night.

Fifty feet from the house, I got a feeling. It was a sucker-punch feeling—my meal prep left on the deck. I started running. Donald ran, too, the way kids will, without asking questions, as if there might be matches and a box of free Roman candles at the end of it.

"Hey, guys?" said Candace. "Wait up." In her peaceful, freewheeling frame of mind, she had put on Rodge's size 12 boots.

The last, short stretch of the path, I kept telling myself that I would not have taken the meat out and left it by the grill, that I would have not put the dishcloth over it to keep the flies off, that I could have, for some reason, left the meat in the fridge, even though everyone knows that meat can't be slapped cold on a hot fire, it needs to mellow out at room temperature. Except that I knew exactly what I had done and why I had done it—believing, at the time, I didn't own a dog.

I also knew what I was going to find, even as I ran through the backyard finding it: bits of gnawed plastic and butcher paper pinwheeling all over the grass. Here a chunk of hot dog casing, there a lump of caribou burger. Blood juice dripped down the steps. The grill lay on its side on the deck, blue propane flames still burning.

I knelt down and turned off the valve. The birches were in their last, tattered days of September green. A leaf whirled down and landed by my foot. It was small, the yellow so fresh and bright it belonged on a bird.

"Dutch," said Donald. "I saw her! She ran right by me."

"Don't chase her," I said. "She'll think it's a game." I stayed down there, delaying the cleanup ahead, folding the leaf along the stem. The edges of it were tinged with brown.

Footsteps thunked across the deck. Carl's footsteps. Carl's boots. He had not taken off and left me with the dog apocalypse. This was so unlike him, it took me a little longer than it should have to understand. "Your animal," I said, "ate sixty pounds of meat."

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.