The dogs went off like a bomb.
There were five of them, big German shepherds, lunging and straining against the metal fence separating their property from the concrete pad where we parked our car.
They began barking the minute they heard the tires crunching down the gravel driveway. Our headlights swung across their faces, panting and snarling blindly in our direction. Their fur stood on end. We cut the lights and sat for a moment, waiting. They seemed otherworldly, glowing like that in the moonlight.
The second full-length collection of short fiction by Leah Browning, Before and After a Slice of Cake, features a generous selection of stories about risk and reward.
A woman falls in love with her new houseplant. A mouse at the center of a laboratory experiment makes a dangerous friend. And, in a series of interconnected stories, two young newlyweds move across the country and find themselves trapped in their new home by the neighbors' dogs.
Reality and surreality are interwoven in this array of strange, haunting, sometimes suspenseful stories. As in her first full-length compilation, Browning's writing runs the gamut: Before and After a Slice of Cake includes everything from reflective literary fiction to miniature gems of magical realism. These stories are fitted together like puzzle pieces, creating an elaborate jewel box of a collection.
