Skeets, by Patrick G. Davis.
A quiet novel about a man coming home from the army, the uncle who raised him, a stray dog, and the woman who hands the dog over without telling him the whole truth. Published by Serpenti Creative Services Inc., November 2026.
A quiet book arrived at the studio this year. It is about a man named Mac who comes home from two years in the army and finds that the uncle who raised him has gone quiet in a way the uncle himself doesn’t quite understand. It is about the girl Mac left for the army, who is with someone else now. And it is about a stray dog that a police officer puts in his arms, insisting he keep it. Then, when the dog has done enough of its work, she tells him something that changes everything else.
The book is a hundred and twenty-six pages. It moves at the pace of someone who has decided to be quieter.
Why we took it on
Most books about returning soldiers try to be about the war. This one isn’t. It is about what war does to someone who already had too little to come home to — a parent-shaped hole, a love that didn’t wait, a county that doesn’t quite remember you the way you remember it — and the particular small restoration a dog can be when the person has run out of ways to ask for help.
Patrick G. Davis writes about Mac the way you might write about a younger brother who came back wrong. There is no clinical language. No PTSD vocabulary. Just a man who notices he has stopped feeling things, and who doesn’t know how to say so, and a dog who begins to interrupt that silence without asking permission.
It is short, and we think that is a strength. A longer version of this book would have told you what to feel. This one lets you feel it.
What we built
Serpenti released Skeets under its own imprint, as publisher of record. The ISBNs are registered under the studio — 9781969642777 for the EPUB, 9781969642784 for the paperback, 9781969642791 for the hardcover — and the publishing operations behind those numbers are ours to be accountable to.
The cover was built around the thumbnail. Most prospective readers meet a book at a hundred and sixty pixels wide; the composition had to hold its shape there before it earned the right to hold it on a shelf. The silhouetted figures, the collie on the grass, the moon as backlight, the SKEETS wordmark pressed into the lower frame — each decision was tested at the size a reader actually encounters first, and only then at the size a bookseller would.
Interior typesetting was done once and reflowed across three formats: a hardcover at 5 × 0.5 × 8 inches, a paperback at 5 × 0.34 × 8 inches, and an EPUB that respects a reader’s own type preferences. Metadata, categories, and keywords were registered with distribution.
Retail distribution was set up to Amazon — the Kindle edition alongside both print formats — and to Barnes & Noble — the NOOK edition alongside paperback and hardcover. The two footprints together reach the overwhelming majority of English-language readers who buy books in either digital or physical form.