THE GRUESOME GOURMET
 
My mother loved corpses
Folded in with the custard; 
She smoked out the kitchen like a witch
In Macbeth. 
Taylor’s Toxicology shared shelf-space with
 Julia Child; Mom often
Talked Trotsky over
Soft-boiled eggs. She
Smeared more Mercurochrome
Than was strictly necessary
On juvenile cuts; dabbed with dilated pupils like
An artist in mayhem or an MGM makeup man
While Father ate mute
Pacifist chili from cans in his room
Re-readingKonTiki.
I became vegetarian. 
It’s true what they say about 
Becoming your past; 
When I hear “Lizzie Borden”
I think of mutton for breakfast in
Sticky red sauce.
 
 

 Since publication of my psychological thriller, Woman Into Wolf  I find myself 
fielding two main questions: one, what is a psychological thriller, and two, where do I get 
my ideas? 
 I usually end up telling the story about how as a kid I added “motive” cards to the 
game of Clue.  I just wasn’t satisfied with a “solution” telling us Mrs. White killed 
Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with a candlestick. Why? I wanted to know. What the 
hell possessed her? Psychological studies typically concern themselves with the 
wilderness of the mind, and the “thriller” description represents extreme adventuring 
where anything – literally – might happen.  
 Where I get my ideas is a much easier question. There’s never a need to make 
anything up. I am a devoted and fascinated reader of true crime. If anything, reality needs 
toning down to make it fictionally believable.  Woman Into Wolfweaves three real 
cases together in an effort to answer the question, What possessed them? to a reader’s 
satisfaction.
 Certain cases stick in my mind like pebbles while the pearls of fiction form slowly 
around them.  I puzzle.  I speculate. I analyze. One example shows what I mean. 
 On August 4, 1999 two young men from Boston hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon in 
New Mexico. Planning to make camp for one night before moving on.  They were 
college graduates,  best  friends, “seeing the sights” on their way to California.  One of 
the pair, a Jack Kerouac fan and an aspiring writer, was considering turning their 
adventures into a travel piece. He was the one airlifted out on Sunday, August 8 with 
“moderate to severe dehydration.” His friend left in a bodybag. 
 What happened? 
The survivor told police he only stabbed his friend – two times – because his 
friend begged him to.  Because of the planned brevity of their stay they had taken in only 
three small bottles of water, but got lost, became disoriented and wandered in circles.  
They left desperate notes for the park rangers, then became convinced the rangers were 
playing tricks on them. They were certain the buzzards overhead were just waiting for 
signs of manifest weakness to attack. We know this because they recorded this part in the 
joint travel journal they were keeping. Strangely, the dead man wrote nothing about 
wanting to die or asking his friend to hurry the process along.   
The rangers were bothered by the survivor’s story. No one had ever become lost 
in this small park in its hundred year history. The rangers found the campers a ten-
minute walk from the trailhead. After his friend’s death, the survivor covered the body 
with rocks weighing as much as fifty pounds. Why hadn’t that energy been used to climb 
the hill where the parking lot was clearly visible? The coroner determined that the six 
foot tall, 180-pound camper died just a few hours before rescue. If the murder hadn’t
occurred, he would have undoubtedly been rescued with his friend. 
But there was no legal need for extensive ratiocination: New Mexico law doesn’t 
give a free pass even to mercy killers.  The survivor was indicted for murder.  
The survivor claimed to be chastened by his traumatizing experience but he also 
said that he had done the right thing, and even knowing what he knew now, he would do 
it again.The dead man’s family rallied round him; publicly stating that this was a tragedy 
for all of them, and there was no way this loyal friend would have intentionally harmed 
his buddy. The survivor’s lawyer first attempted a defense of temporary insanity (not 
allowed under New Mexico law, which requires insanity to be documented and of long 
standing) then went for “involuntary intoxication” – a legal defense – thinking of the salt 
buildup caused by a level of dehydration historically linked to hallucinations and poor
coping skills. Incidentally, the judge rejected this defense. 
So what happened? If you have any propensity for structuring psychological 
thrillers, your neurons must be collectively firing. This tragic scenario is like a two 
person play by Beckett or Pinter.  It’s pretty obvious any question about who did what to 
whom is secondary to the problem of identity. Who werethese people? Two young men 
who had always done everything right, by all accounts, in their families, at church and 
school, on the job, even in their intimate relationships. The dead man was on his way to 
California to attend graduate school. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear about 
compulsive I-dotters and T-crossers I always picture people who are “outer-directed.”  
That means they’ve traditionally taken their life cues from externals – leaving their inner 
beings unexplored – possibly even unconsulted. In a good psychological thriller, what the 
internal voyager discovers in his subconscious is as much a surprise to him as to the 
reader.  What this story makes apparent is that as soon as the outward signals were 
removed, these two young men fell apart pretty dramatically.  
When the rangers found the survivor, he was waiting quietly in his tent, next to 
the cairn of stones he built over his deaf friend’s body. Often when he talked about 
ending his friend’s suffering, it sounded as if he was also ending his own.  It was just 
easier to wait for rescue without his friend around. Therein, to my mind, lies Clue #1.  
These friends grew up together and did everything together, seemingly using their 
relationship as a sort of existential echo-location. I am I because you are you, and if you 
are there, then I must be here. It is the demanding drive for self-definition within each of 
us that causes us to sever – or at least yank sharply on – tether and lifeline alike.  
One of the friends was the leader and one was the follower.  And it seems the 
leader had made a series of catastrophically bad decisions. We all know how hard that 
can be to live with – and to live down. In the noisy whistling of the leadership vacuum 
reproach becomes unbearable. In today’s reality-show world, increasingly it is only the 
public self that matters. Unknown failures can be literally “undone”. The Victorians 
understood this very well.  In their day, “status preservation” was a major motive for 
murder in both the upper and middle class. 
One of the questions the detectives had was why the campers tried to burn a 
sleeping bag for a signal fire within sight of a large dead tree. Surely a little arson is 
preferable to death? As it turned out, the sleeping bag was a failure as fuel.  The bag had 
been chosen, the survivor said, because they had two and needed only one.  Although 
everyone who knew the pair insisted they were complete heterosexuals, my mind does a 
little U-turn on this piece of information.  The prosecution even tried to make much of 
the fact that they had once shared a girlfriend, only to be shot down by the complete lack 
of cooperation of the relevant witness. Once again, the fewer people around with first-
hand knowledge of our psychic and emotional dissonances, the easier we may find it to 
go on living.  
I also think we live in an “instant gratification” society where the only strategy for 
change we are used to is the “make it stop” wish. “This isn’t any fun, let’s not do it any 
more.”
“Yeah man, this is getting to be a real drag.” 
But how to make it stop just when we want it to, if there are no buttons, no 
switches?  How dare the cosmos be so unresponsive when we’ve decided we need a new 
game? This question – the relationship between reality and one’s demands -- leads us 
further into the psychological wilderness.  
The young men from Boston listened to the ranger’s instructions with only half an 
ear between the two of them. They failed to take the recommended amount of water, they 
searched for non-existent campsites and they abandoned their topographical map because 
they couldn’t read it. We all know that any sense of superiority carries shadowy 
concomitants of guilt and fear.  If others knew our superiority, they would resent us. Even 
hate us, and I know that because in their situation, I would feel the same. Unlike Jack 
Kerouac, these young men grew up with an easy confidence that law existed to protect 
their rights and privileges. But their education had taught them that not everyone is so 
fortunate.
Hence the stated fear that the rangers were playing tricks on them, moving trail 
markers and teasing the campers with unreachable bottles of water. By the third day the
young men feared that the rangers would cover up their deaths to hide their own 
incompetence.  
And then there are the buzzards, the pitiless “eyes in the sky” waiting to peck out
their own eyes. What do you do when death is inevitable and the universe doesn’t seem
 to care? The ancients handled this question through sacrifice; demanding the right to 
pick the next to fall. It is an insult to the magnificence of our human capabilities to let the 
buzzards choose. 
Since a psychological thriller must of necessity concern itself with subjects’ lives 
as a whole, it is a real question where to start.  Author William Goldman’s advice, to start 
“as late in the story as possible” is good, I think. In this case, I can’t help but feel that the 
real story begins afterwards, in the throes of survivor’s complex. The surviving camper 
was sentenced to fifteen years.  He served fifteen months and has now gone back to his 
blamelessly unexamined life, in spite of being handed a literary subject Kerouac would 
envy and perhaps only Hemingway could handle. One can’t help but wonder what his 
days and nights are like.  The Apaches who still protect Rattlesnake Canyon could have 
told him, when you kill something, it becomes part of you forever.