Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in Sabina Murray’s third book, A Carnivore’s Inquiry. A Pen-Faulkner award-winner for the short story collection, The Caprices, Murray introduces us to the itinerant 23yr. old Katherine Shea, who has just arrived to the U.S. after time spent roaming through Europe. Amidst hipster protestors carting signs that read: COLUMBUS BLOODY COLUMBUS and COLUMBUS WAS A MURDER, Katherine encounters a Russian émigré novelist, Boris Naryshkin. As quickly as they meet, they take up house together, and this begins our immersion in this elegant and fiercely engaging novel.

As the story unfolds, the reader becomes more intimate with Katherine’s detached persona from which we gather Is due greatly in part to a cold wealthy father who doles our impersonal presents like faxes, and on a trip to the zoo, he confesses, “I suppose I have to feed you.” Feeding is keenly appropriate when we meet Katherine’s eccentric and heavily medicated mother who spikes her daughter’s enemies’ Halloween treats with anti-psychotic medication and delivers horrific tales about the bloody Donner party as if they were bedtime stories. The murky family history is deliberate on the part of the author and heightens a surprising and highly satisfying ending. Like mother, daughter becomes obsessed with cannibalism – musing over the works of Goya (notably “Saturn” from the Black Paintings – does Saturn, in his fear of death, devour the son that will assume his throne?), Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, the folktales of Hansel and Gretel, and other great works of literature (Melville & Poe) and history that revolve around this theme. Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive.

Through the course of the novel, Katherine moves to a small cabin Maine and then across the great plains of the Midwest to the ancestral burial grounds of New Mexico. A series of brutal murders follows her passage, and with deft narration and supremely elegant prose, Murray draws out the thinning margins of Katherine’s sanity: her desperation for comfort and warmth, yet her need for survival. As the reader speeds towards the novel’s climax, the threads of her family’s true and frighteningly sinister history quickly unravel.

In a wonderful blurb, Jonathan Ames relates the novel to Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and he couldn’t be more accurate as the two hold up society’s obsession with greed, survival by any means necessary and the wonderfully calculated and controlled voice of Patrick Bateman is chillingly similar to Katherine Shea.