Excerpt from The People of the Broken Neck by Silas Dent Zobal, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

THE NIGHT noises startled the children from sleep. The turn of an engine. The pad of some quick dark feet. A rock falling distantly into the river. When they half woke and slit their adapted eyes through the narrow aperture of the cloth cinched around their faces, they would see him. A great shadow with broad wide-set legs. A breadth of shoulder that they knew as intuitively as their own smaller shapes. A woody smell to the air and a sense of immovability. Their eyes would close again. Their breath would even out. On the ground, they slept well, so long as their father, silent and impassable and granitic, guarded against the night.

He waited in the dark with his hands cupped before his face. His name was Dominick Clarke Sawyer. His kids' faces were like points of light circled by the dark fabric of their mummy bags. Dominick did not think of who had been inside his house. He did not think of how the lights had swept back and forth systematically looking, looking. He did not think about whom the lights had looked for. He did not think about his past or about the weight of the pistol in the waistband holster beneath his belt. He did not think about where his boot prints could be seen crossing the mud of the field or how a barred owl had hooh-hoohed in alarm because he and his kids had lain down near the nest. He did not consider why he had disconnected the cabin's main line from the electrical box.

What he thought about was his children. The deep mysterious ache of his love for them hurt like something huge he'd swallowed. Where to take them now? How to keep them safe from what had come for them? How to keep them as they were, quietly at rest, wrapped and warm and cocooned in the dark? Where? His sister's house in Illinois? North? South?

His daughter, King, turned inside her mummy bag. Then her eyes opened. She whispered, "Hi."

"Hello," Dominick said.

"Where are we?"

"Out behind our house. Camping out. Remember?"

"Oh. Okay."

"Go back to sleep now."

"Have you been here with us all night?"

"Yes, right here."

"You didn't go anywhere?"

"Where else would I go?"

She went to sleep again, and then both his children slept side by side. He sat next to them and waited. He felt something welling up in him, maybe the past or the thought of the flashlights in his house, lighting up his kids' things, and he clamped down on his thoughts hard, held them to the moment. He sat quietly and waited. He held his mind still, the effort as physical as holding back a leashed dog. Until, in the last minute before the ground broke with light, Dominick saw it. A hovering something for which he knew no adequate terms. A dark cloud that rose from the log cabin and hovered and pulsed with menace and swung a part of itself, a great insubstantial head, back and forth as though searching all of them out. Dominick's heart beat like two sheets of steel clapped together. He let himself slowly sink between his two children. He held his breath. His eyes squinted the cabin into a narrow line. The edge of the sky broke into crepuscular rays and, as light began to color the cabin's cedar-shake roof, the dark cloud winked out of existence as though it had never been a possibility at all. But it left Dominick's heart stuttering and the chimney smoke crooked, like a thin finger, toward the north.

Excerpted from The People of the Broken Neck, by Silas Dent Zobal. © 2016 by Silas Dent Zobal. All rights reserved.