The Butcher and the Wren
The Butcher and the Wren
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Alaina Urquhart on The Butcher and the Wren
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A nightmare and an unanswered questionThe book’s most harrowing setting came before any plot existed. She woke from a dream she couldn’t shake and did the only thing that made sense.
I had a weird nightmare years ago that I was being chased through a swamp. Terrifying, but there were loud, inorganic noises being pumped in. I woke up in a cold sweat and immediately scribbled it into a notepad. It was too weird and too scary not to.
The nightmare gave her atmosphere, but the novel’s structural premise came from a question she had carried for years as a true crime podcaster. Real-life killers who taunt investigators almost always get caught by doing so, and she kept wondering what the story would look like if that pattern broke.
Nothing is scarier to me than a killer who brazenly communicates with those investigating their case. It’s a weirdly bold move that in real life, usually ends up being the killer’s downfall, but I’ve always wondered what would happen if these calling cards didn’t bring them down right away.
That hypothetical is the engine of the book: not a killer who is impossible to catch, but one who is arrogant enough to court detection and sharp enough to survive it, at least for a while.
How she wrote it
Morgues, Google Earth, and horror film DNAYears spent as an autopsy technician gave her a forensic foundation no research trip could replicate, but the book required her to go further. Louisiana’s swamps and hunting laws were new territory, and she filled the gaps the way she filled gaps in the morgue: methodically.
My experience as an autopsy technician really came in handy for this novel. Even things I wasn’t sure of, I was able to check by falling deeply into medical journals. It was so fascinating and I learned some things that I never would have, had I not been looking for such odd facts. Not to mention that I have never been to most of the places in this book, so it was a lot of research and a lot of Google Earth.
Her decade co-hosting Morbid, the true crime podcast she runs with her niece Ash Kelley, trained her to stay clinical when discussing real victims. Fiction let her drop that constraint and go somewhere the podcast couldn’t.
While on the podcast, I maintain a more fact-based/clinical tone to avoid having the stories of real victims feel like exploitative entertainment. In my fiction, I allow myself a bit more creativity in my narrative style. In this novel, I tried to fold in the things I see, smell, and hear in the morgue as much as possible. As an avid crime fiction reader myself, I always crave that extra authenticity and nothing beats firsthand experience.
Her creative frame of reference skews toward horror as much as crime fiction. She named the works that set her standard for how far to push a scene.
I absolutely love horror movies and I have a real love for anatomy. Both of these parts of my brain contributed a lot to this book. Silence of the Lambs, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street… they all constantly inspire me to be scarier and to push it further in my fiction writing.
She finished the book and went on to write sequels, which gave her a vantage point she didn’t have at the time. Looking back at the first novel during a Morbid podcast livestream, she was affectionate but unsentimental about what she now sees as its looseness.
I read The Butcher and the Wren and I’m like, I love that book still. But I’m like, wow, you were just beginning because you just let it flow at times. [paraphrased from audio]
That candor about her own debut is rare. She treated the first book’s unchecked momentum as a lesson, and tightened her approach in the sequels.
The personal thread
What Wren taught her about herselfShe built Dr. Wren Muller, the forensic pathologist at the center of the novel, partly as a corrective to her own habits under pressure. The character became a model she hadn’t known she needed.
I tend to push emotions away immediately while in work-mode, and it was important to me that she be strong, but real as well... Wren has helped me to see that I can take a second to allow the stress of something scary to crack me open for a moment before getting back to work. I never knew that this sort of self-growth could be part of writing, but I have to say, I’m grateful for it.
Beyond the writing itself, seeing the finished audiobook performed brought something unexpected. She had heard her own words read back to her in interviews and on the podcast, but this was different: actors inhabiting people she had invented.
When I first got to hear people reading the lines that I wrote and like embodying characters that I made, it’s the most surreal thing you will ever experience. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Invisible evil and the cost of paying attentionShe sees the true crime genre’s popularity as something more than morbid curiosity. The appetite for it reflects a real and rational anxiety, one she built Jeremy Decker, the novel’s killer, specifically to embody.
I think the true crime boom is really based on our collective fears. True crime forces us to face the reality that evil people exist, and that we can’t always pick them out at first glance. These are real people and these atrocities can happen to anyone.
Her work as an autopsy technician imposed a discipline on how she writes victims, in fiction as in the podcast. A specific physical gesture from the morgue captures the principle: she described parting a victim’s hair to make necessary cuts without damaging it.
Dignity is key in both my work as a true crime podcaster and as an autopsy technician. For example, I always try to part the victim’s hair in a way that allows me to make the necessary cuts without damaging their hair. Just like the person on my autopsy table is a human being who has people who love them, the people we discuss on Morbid are mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and friends.
The novel refuses to make Jeremy Decker a monster beyond human reckoning. His fallibility is not a flaw in the thriller’s logic but its whole point: the question is whether Wren is attentive enough to catch what he lets slip.
Jeremy will hopefully horrify you, but he’s not a supervillain. He’s capable of failure, and luckily, my girl Wren is there to catch those small slip-ups with her own sharp mind.