A Carnivore's Inquiry

Twenty-three-year-old Katherine journeys from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City, trailed by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings pile up, she comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history. Brilliant, winning, and more than slightly disturbing, Katherine ponders subjects as diverse as the Donner Party, the fall of Dante's Count Ugolino, and the true story behind Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. She -- and we -- race toward a hair-raising conclusion, closing on the reasons for her fascination with aberrant, violent behavior. A shocking and enlightening modern Gothic novel, told in highly intelligent prose, A Carnivore's Inquiry is a subtle commentary on 21st century consumerism and the questionable appetities that lurk beneath the veneer of civilization. Sabina Murray is the author of The Caprices, a collection of WWII short stories that won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She is also a screenwriter whose credits include the forthcoming film Beautiful Country produced by Terence Malik and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts. She grew up in Australia and the Philipines.