Saul, who has lived his entire life on the edge of the Copperton Forest--known for its strange and unusual wildlife--knows little about what stalks him. He knows only that it is dark, and powerful, and unnamable--and that it has stolen his nine-year-old son, Ezzy, from him. Now he must travel into those ethereal woods, further upriver than he's ever gone, into a wondrous, yet surreal and nightmarish world unlike anything he's ever known, to recover his son from the shadows, if he can survive the journey... "Shadow Animals is a nightmare journey into the realm of the fantastique. Deininger's surreal narrative is a live wire of suspense that crackles with tension. Who'd have thought the gates of hell were hidden in the New Mexican wilderness?" Michael McBride, author of Burial Ground and Fearful Symmetry