A Carnivore's Inquiry - Tapa dura

When we meet Katherine, the winning - and rather disturbing - twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore's Inquiry, 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 emigre 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 journeys from literary New York to rural Maine, then across the United States and into Mexico, trailed everywhere she goes by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history, and examines subjects as diverse as the Donnor Party, the fall of Dante's Count Ugolino, and the story behind Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. Slowly Katherine realizes that at the center of the mysterious deaths lies a bloody truth - that in the beam of a flashlight in the woods, in the scrabbling claws in the cupboard, something is making itself known. As the story races towards its frightening conclusion, Katherine, and the reader, close in on the true reason for her fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.

Sabina Murray is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts.