A Carnivore's Inquiry
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From a PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author, The Caprices, seduces readers with a thriller praised as "dazzling . . . lovely, literate and deeply unnerving" (The New York Times Book Review).
When we meet Katherine, the winning—and rather disturbing—twenty-three-year-old narrator, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian émigré novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment. Katherine's occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying across the continent, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine takes to meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history. The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine and the reader close in on the reasons for both her and her mother's fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.
A brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers, A Carnivore's Inquiry is an unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of civilization.
"Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details . . . Readers will be hooked by Murray's classy treatment of her sexy-sinister subject matter." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
That 23-year-old Katherine Shea is an unreliable narrator is evident from the first pages of Murray's mesmerizing new novel (after the PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices). As she describes the way she picks up hapless author Boris Naryshkin on the Manhattan subway, coolly manipulates and moves in with him, drains him of money and sleeps with other men, Katherine's lack of conscience and absence of affect obviously go beyond neurotic and into psychotic territory. Yet she is intelligent and witty in her solipsistic explanation of her needs and behavior, even as she hints at the manifestations of her mother's insanity and reveals the margins of her own unstable personality. Her fascination with cannibalism, and her deep familiarity with its depiction in art (Goya, Gericault), literature (Dante, Poe, Melville), folklore (Hansel and Gretel, the Tale of Bisclaveret) and history (the Donner Party, the voyage of the Essex) is revealed in tandem with the events of a journey that takes her across the country from New York to Mexico, with crucial scenes played out in a cottage in Maine. Katherine's hegira becomes increasingly sinister, and Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details. But the author has a darker purpose. More than the story of one deranged woman's obsession, the novel and its brilliant subtext hint at the ways American society devours the weak, while building a case for a blood hunger in human nature. The tension of the last chapter is followed by a grim suspicion; the reader will go back to the first pages to confirm the worst.
