Synopsis

When the police arrived next door early Saturday morning, a small pack of well-fed feral coyotes sauntered out of the sliding glass door and onto the deck with gorged stomachs and bloody snouts. The Marsh’s had only moved in less than a year and now the Chula Vista detectives were side-stepping the handsome couple’s entrails to put together their grizzly end. The Sharklet’s delivery man called it in – he was inconsolable.

For what had happened, next-door neighbor and suburban husband, Charles Ripley uncharacteristically found himself barely without a pulse. He was calm for had happened. He stood over his own kitchen sink with a view-through his window, washing the blood off of his hands and picking a red, long, broken fingernail out of his back.

Charles Ripley and wife Shelly have worked hard all their lives and have played by all of those middle-class rules. Assets in place, hard-earned and at their disposal, their life’s work and pursuits all in place - but something both didn’t count on at this stage of their lives – boredom.

Ripley sees in Ruskin a man so supremely alive that for the first time, he realizes the extent to which his own passions – for intellectual activity and some basic, simple male companionship, have become deadened under the pressures and stresses of this supposed “American Dream” even if largely fed by aggressive and unyielding appetites. Ruskin Marsh, a man of unnatural ripeness, a connoisseur of the arts, a high–powered lawyer, perfect husband, and father, is an effortless seducer of exquisite women wherever he sees them – in other words, everything Charles Ripley is not.

Ripley, diabolically coaxed by Ruskin into the darkest of impulses and self–absorption, Charles ultimately graduates as sole captain in full-enterprise of buying and selling within the underbelly of the American ideal. Seduced, torn and shredded by the contagion of neighbor Ruskin Marsh, Ripley’s quiet, predictable world, begins to fade. Ripley then feels his mind falling into a state of chaotic turbulence and decay. Introduced to the darker “delicacies” of aggression, where reason and sensibility are formally extinguished, animal passions gain the upper-hand and Charles Ripley is ill-prepared for what is to come.

By now his once quiet, sedate world becomes that of a living-nightmare. His 9 to 5 company-man life is overtaken by the seductive urges of greed and sexual gluttony. It at all becomes an unquenchable thirst for the unthinkable - the consumption of everything, everyone and even something much darker.

Chula Vista’s young girls begin to vanish, marriages end violently, nights are split with endless and desperate screams. Like those paintings, Hieronymus Bosch so aptly reflected of his time, Ripley’s brutal transition in which Bosch lived, faces its own upheaval – from sedate to predatory, from satisfied to hungry, from dull to alert - where his own carefully, crafted suburban order finds itself in a torrid, irreversible decline.

But still, Charles needs a friend, and Ruskin Marsh is willing to share his secret of life, and the source of his passions. Caught up in an accelerating maelstrom of ghastly, unimaginable rites, Charles Ripley, for the first time, now begins to see what Ruskin Marsh calls, the beauty of life and is more than willing to take the first bite.