The Inquisitor

Not much could prepare a reader for first-time novelist Murrey's disturbing story of a lonely woman's unnatural attachment to a stray Doberman pinscher. At 34, Priscilla has a dull hospital job and an even duller love life and, hoping to spice things up and get a grip, she moves to an old house in rural Florida. There, her women's support group has her dabbling in paganism, and she's taken to saving her menstrual blood and burying it outdoors. At night, the howls of a large black Doberman prove eerily comforting to her, and she adopts this fierce, powerful creature as her own, naming him Robin. Soon she is spending every free moment with him, ignoring friends and family and gaining a sense of power and liberation by going barefoot, peeing outside and avoiding bathing. Eventually, she has sex with Robin in a surprisingly erotic encounter. The writing, while unsophisticated, is clear and effectively captures the combination of fear and delight Priscilla feels every time she shatters a taboo as she pursues her horrifying--and often mesmerizing--exploration of a forbidden world. But then the story shifts, transferring the burden of horror from Robin to Priscilla's apparently affable neighbor and the pulpy commonplace brutalities it turns out he has committed. Plotwise, this twist has a certain logic to it. But it throws the book's tone too far toward the didactic as the tale devolves into a New Age hymn to the goddess--and to the women who lay with the wolves. (Oct.)