Book Review: The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart
Something new. Something borrowed. Some musings on originality.
The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart. Narrated by Sophie Amoss and Joe Knezevich. Zando, 2022. 6 hours (approx.).
There is an old saying that if you’re a writer you’ve definitely heard: “Write what you know.” It is believed to have been first coined by Mark Twain. Some, like critically acclaimed author Nathan Englander, argue the statement is about emotions rather than people, events, etc. Still, bringing expertise to a novel never hurts. An author who has worked as an autopsy technician has the advantage when writing a story featuring a forensic pathologist hot on the trail of a serial killer.
That’s exactly what makes The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart so good. Urquhart worked as an autopsy technician beginning in 2016. In addition, she is co-host of Morbid, a true crime podcast. She is, evidently, well versed in real-life serial killers.
Urquhart is also well-read in the horror genre as she cites inspiration from Stephen King and other authors and makes allusions to Hellraiser and The Silence of the Lambs. However, we have to ask, how much did she borrow from these sources?
The novel alternates between two perspectives: Dr. Wren Muller and Jeremy. Muller is a Louisiana forensic pathologist working on the Bayou Butcher case. Jeremy is the aforementioned butcher. Like an episode of Columbo, the interest is not in whodunit but in the cat-and-mouse chase.
Urquhart deftly handles the back-and-forth required for such a setup. For example, Jeremy - who likes to toy with the authorities - drops a body under a stage at a jazz festival. On the corpse Muller discovers a smartwatch and cemetery map with a certain plot marked. From this she deduces the watch’s pin number and, subsequently, the location of the next victim. Muller and police rescue that victim only moments before she was meant to die, thus spoiling Jeremy’s master plan. This sends Jermey into a fit, and he makes a number of frustration-induced mistakes stalking his next victim.
The only misstep Urquhart takes is in revealing a plot-significant secret at the beginning of the novel’s second part. That Urquhart kept a secret until the novel’s halfway point is fine, but her handling of it was clunky. Even so, the novel is very good.
But we now must return to the issue of borrowing. There is a lot in The Butcher and the Wren that comes from The Silence of the Lambs and “The Most Dangerous Game” (both are mentioned by name). In my opinion there are elements of the Saw franchise as well as Seven. Admittedly, these similarities may be coincidental, but given Urquhart’s expertise in the subject area I am inclined to say she borrowed (perhaps inadvertently) from these other works.
This is not a condemnation. Rereading the works of Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, I must admit to how much I was inspired by them. It is a natural part of writing to imitate your favorite authors. All the greats did it. Even T. S. Elliot famously quipped, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.”
Journalists try to get around the problem of originality with “angles,” as in “give me a new angle on it,” or “come up with a fresh take.” My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I always thought this solution wasn’t much of a solution; it’s only a matter of time before all the angles are used up, too. Also, how is one supposed to be original when one cannot possibly read (or watch, or listen, or whatever) to everything humanity has made? Somewhere someone has already taken that angle on the subject.
Still, I believe the effort must be made, otherwise you’re just repeating the last thing said in a conversation. I once had a back and forth with a fantasy about the use of an emotion-devouring monster as cliche. He said the creature was a fantasy genre trope, and if I didn't like it then fantasy wasn’t for me. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. This writer was using genre as an excuse for lazy writing.
In the final analysis, the novelist can only write the story she wants to write - for better or worse, original or not. Urquhart drew upon her vast knowledge of horror, crime and forensic science. The result may not be completely original, but it wasn’t a copy either. It was a compelling novel.