Excerpt from The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But the day was so lovely, and he was whining and pulling hard, dragging her across the grass, making the gagging noises dogs make when they lunge against their collars. Sometimes a dog just needs to run away with itself, she thought—an unruly idea that might not have occurred to her had she not been brooding about the incident in the parking lot. She'd only meant to be encouraging. Why was even the simplest gesture so complicated? You worry about everything, Julia was always telling her.

"Oh, for God's sake, Binx." She bent down and unclipped the leash from his collar, watching as he shot across the meadow, immediately realizing her mistake.

He ran toward the woods, divided from the rest of the park by a shallow creek where primordial-looking skunk cabbages flourished greenly in black mud along with clusters of poison ivy, just turning scarlet. Ignoring Margaret's cries, he leapt into the creek and wallowed for a few moments before clambering out of the mud and up the opposite bank. Then he shook himself and galloped toward where the pine trees cast jagged shadows onto the bright grass.

But instead of running into the woods he stopped to nose a boulder under a tall clump of sumac, his back legs muddy and gleaming. Margaret hurried over the little wooden footbridge, calling his name, knowing that she would have to catch him by the collar and haul him away from whatever he had found.

The sun was in her eyes, and at first she noticed only sumac, its stalks already turning the chalky lavender that comes to sumac in the fall. Underneath was not a boulder but something enormous and pale, its coat so short as to make it seem hairless. Teeth bared, huge furrowed face contorted in a snarl. Bloodied, yellowish foam had collected around the folds of its muzzle.

A breeze brushed Margaret's forehead and stirred the tasseled grasses and a spray of goldenrod at the verge of the woods. From deep within the trees came the high igniting sounds of small birds. In a moment it would come to her what she was seeing and what she should do about it. But in the vast divide between one moment and the next, she could only stare at the creature, white and motionless, almost too big to be believable, the smooth skin of his underbelly spotted with wide pale freckles, so exposed, so tender-looking, so innocent and perverse.

Excerpted from The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne. Copyright © 2016 by Suzanne Berne. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.