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

That's what it said on the plans that Benny and I ordered from Sears. The baby for the nursery didn't work out, the way it doesn't for some people. And so Benny and I did other things. He was tight with the Natives, as we called every tribe back then, as if they were all one big happy family or we just couldn't bother to learn the phonetics. His parents had been Methodist missionaries in the village of Kotzebue, trying to convert Inupiat until they had stumbled down to Anchorage, confused about their life's agenda. The Arctic Circle is not the place to go if you have even the slightest existential question.

That was something Benny always said. He knew Alaska better than me, mostly because I showed up on a ferry at age five, with a baby-blue Samsonite and a piece of cardboard hanging from my neck: FLIGHT TRANSFER TO ANCHORAGE. DELIVER TO MRS. AURORA KING. My parents had died in a head-on crash outside Spokane. Aunt Aurora was my nearest relative.

Aunt Aurora was a second-grade teacher in the downtown school district. She was deeply into young girls being educated in the ways of our Lord, and I met Benny at yet another Sunday at United Methodist. I was seventeen. He grabbed me the last shortbread cookie at coffee hour and spilled tea on his flannel shirt so we would have matching stains.

A week later he took me to the Garden of Eatin', which was located in a Quonset hut in a part of Anchorage I had never been to. It was the fanciest place I had ever eaten. Tablecloths on every table. Real napkins. We ate Salisbury steak and vanilla ice cream, and I was careful not to lick my plate. Two months later we were married.

Benny loved me, but he also loved men. He was not that different from a lot of guides and hunters at that time. They wanted to be out in the wilderness with another man without anybody seeing. For weeks. For whole summers. He never lied about it, I never asked beyond the minimum, and we never discussed it. We understood what marriage was—the ability to hold hands and not try to forgive the other person, not try to understand them, just hold hands.

After my fifth miscarriage, they removed my entire reproductive system while I was asleep and couldn't stop them. As soon as I was well enough to sit up, Benny dumped his shotgun buddy—a guy he had been affectionate with, in secret, for most of his life—and took me up to the snowfields to go after wolves.

"You have to have a taste for it," he said my first time. How else could he explain why you would shove your gun out the open window of a single-prop plane drilling hell for the horizon, your face a mask of eyes and ice, your hands so cold that when you aimed for the animal fleeing across the white, your fingers did not move the way they were supposed to. Or mine didn't. The first time, I cut my finger on the window latch and had to pull back on the trigger still slick with my own blood.

It was warm blood, at least. And I was alive. Despite any wish I might have had to be otherwise, which was maybe what Benny was trying to show me.

Most of this is to say that despite the local gossip, the wolf room was probably smaller than anybody at my open house expected. There are no windows. There is no furniture save 387 individually whittled pegs. On each peg hangs a pelt, most of them silver, black-tipped fur. Others reddish brown.

The ones staple-gunned to the ceiling are all albino white. The ones laid down on the floor are all females, with tails that can trip you if you don't watch out, though no one watches out. Walking into the wolf room is like walking into a forest of fur. Or a feathery winter silence that lets your brain finally go quiet.

"You'll never trust anyone like you trust your shotgun buddy," Benny told me the night before my first hunt. Though he did not say it, he was speaking about his shotgun buddy and how much he missed him and who I had to be for Benny from there on out.

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.