A Carnivore's Inquiry
by Sabina Murray
Review by Stephen Dedman
(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)
(Review first appeared in The West Australian)
Katherine Shea is a superficially attractive twenty-two year old college dropout with a flair for the dramatic. She returns from Italy to her native America, where she instantly picks up Boris, a middle-aged expatriate Russian writer, author of 'A Soulless Man' and other depressing books. Boris takes her to Maine to see the leaves falling, and finds that the main topic of conversation is a serial killer known as Bad Billy who has recently escaped from a nearby asylum. Katherine becomes intrigued by Bad Billy, but this is hardly surprising: Katherine has been raised on the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, empathizes with the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story, is fascinated by Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of cannibalism.
Becoming bored with Boris, Katherine sneaks out of their hotel room and picks up a local man, Malley. After giving him a detailed history of the Monster of Montluel, a vampire in love with a cannibal, Katherine wakes up back in her own car alone. She later learns that Malley has been found dead, with a huge chunk of flesh bitten from his throat. Bad Billy is blamed, even though he’s previously only attacked single women.
Katherine decides to stay in Maine rather than return to New York, and persuades Boris to rent a cottage there. Almost as soon as he’s gone, she invites a young violinist she sees busking on the street to move in with her, and begins leaving food in the woods for Bad Billy. Then she receives part of her inheritance from her mother – including a ranch in New Mexico, a postcard sized reproduction of The Raft of the Medusa, and a complete skeleton that may or may not be the remains of an Anasazi cannibalistic feast. She returns to Boris’s New York apartment for a literary party that makes the Donner party seem like harmless fun, has a nerve-wracking encounter with an ex-husband, then flies back to Maine with another two young men in her thrall. We gradually learn more about Katherine’s history, and her psychopathic mother (including seeing her poison the local children on her favourite holiday, Halloween, while watching old horror films). . . and why so many of the men who are drawn to Katherine die or disappear.
It’s difficult to summarize A Carnivore’s Inquiry without making it sound melodramatic, but Sabina Murray has managed to turn this undeniably grim and gruesome tale of madness and murder into a strange mixture of gothic novel and philosophical treatise. Told in first person by Katherine in a detached and almost clinical tone, it draws on literature, art and history to show how cannibalism has always fascinated and excited us. She even cites cases from American and Australian history to show how societies which value success above all else, and have little or no sympathy for victims, sometimes admire cannibals for their determination and survival instinct: “Didn’t everyone love a cannibal? Wasn’t he already half-formed at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum?” And while most of the cannibals in the stories Katherine relates are male, she shows that women can also be predatory as well as parasitic.
The novel’s plot may seem disappointingly predictable to thriller or horror fans, but then, so is the plot of a tragedy. And while it gives a tip of the nib to Psycho and Silence of the Lambs (as well as the works of Dante, Melville, Poe, Mary Shelley, Dali, Picasso, Goya, Gericault, and Diego Rivera), A Carnivore’s Inquiry more closely resembles Angela Carter’s unsettling investigations of villainy and lycanthropy, or Brett Easton Ellis’s grimly satirical American Psycho, than any of the more conventional serial killer shockers on the market.
Like the works that inspired it (Murray admits in her acknowledgements that a book on Goya ‘gnawed on my mind for the last twenty-eight years’), A Carnivore’s Inquiry is dark and disturbing and definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste. If you like well-written and insightful psychological horror, however. . . then bon appetit.
Copyright © Stephen Dedman
Publisher: Grove Press (hardcover 2004) ; Grove Press (paperback 2005)
ISBN: 0802117694 (Grove 2004 hardcover); 0802142001 (Grove 2005 paperback)