The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.

This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.

Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had [...]