Content Note: Mentions of child sexual abuse, incest, murder.
There is a troubling trend among true-crime fans to cross over from morbid curiosity to idealization. It always bothers me to see people tattooed with faces of serial killers or when men like Ted Bundy are described as ‘hot.’ It seems like this niche of fans doesn’t consider the real human impact of serial killer idolization or sensationalizing murder but aren’t actually evil for the most part. Gone to See the River Man encapsulates the mindset that would see a crime against humanity as a virtue worthy of swoon.
Lori is pen pals with one of the most horrific serial killers of her time, Edmond Cox. She sees Edmond and herself as kindred spirits, tied together by darkness and evil. When Edmond asks Lori to run an errand of sorts for him, she embarks on a quest that she believes will bring her and Edmond closer together. Even before we see vignettes of Lori’s seemingly typical childhood, she seems like nothing more than a delusional fan with completely misplaced ethics.
When we first meet Lori, she’s a lonely, middle aged waitress who lives with her disabled sister, Abby. Lori doesn’t have much of a life outside her job and her caregiver duties, but she does have what she considers a satisfying relationship with Cox, a man who is rotting in prison for brutally murdering and sexually abusing women. Edmond is not Lori’s first or only murderous pan pal (she collects letters from murders like baseball cards), but he is the first to take their relationship to the next level. Edmond has entrusted Lori to find a key from his old river shack and bring it to a mysterious “River Man.” With a map of the river and not much else, Lori eagerly takes up this request. Without having much natural support to take care of Abby while she’s gone, Lori opts to bring Abby along for the journey.
How Lori thinks about Cox evolves throughout the story; she describes herself as fascinated by him and the things he has done, and completely flattered that he chose her to do him a favor over the other women in his life. She denies to herself and the audience that there’s anything romantic or sexual going on between her and Edmond. At first, Lori’s main motivation for carrying out this task is pure competitive spite for a particular woman Edmond communicates with, a woman who is more like Edmond’s victims than Lori. Lori’s obsessive need to be better than the people around her will become one of the defining features of her life, and will ultimately lead to its ruin.
Through flashbacks in the narrative, we learn about the sisters and their family. Prior to these flashbacks, the dynamic between Lori and Abby is one of caregiver (Lori) and dependent child (Abby) but their relationship was not always this way. We also see the sisters had a younger brother and the three siblings seemed to live a normal middle-class, American life with Abby being the pretty, popular, more experienced older sister who garners massive amounts of jealousy from Lori. These flashbacks are webbed between scenes from Lori’s current reality; hiking long hours in the backwoods while trying to care for Abby, discovering the horrors of Edmond’s cabin and marching forward with her mission despite them. Lori describes being dismayed seeing one of Edmond’s victims and by extension seeing Edmond for who he really is. However as the journey continues, her mind becomes more frantic and the dismay at seeing Edmond’s work up close and personal fade; she’s laser-focused on her task and begins to see anything slowing her down (Abby, warnings from a local, no way to physically make it up the river) as obstacles that she desperately needs to overcome. She and Abby come across a kind resident of the river who lets them stay the night, allowing them to continue their journey rather than turn back. Lori notices Abby’s behavior is becoming stranger, more abrasive than her normal sunny self. Despite the strong warning from the resident to stop, that obsessive desire to be better than others, to succeed where others can’t completely overtakes Lori.
Lori and Abby make it to their destination (though not without some bloodshed) and what waits for them on the other side of this journey draws out the festering evil that’s been in Lori since her childhood. SPOILERS By this point we have learned that as a teenager, Lori abused, raped, and tried to kill her siblings. Brought on by what she describes as a desire to become good at sex in order to best Abby, who has regular sex with her boyfriend, she begins raping her younger brother until he dies by suicide. Abby discovers Lori’s abuse one night and when she confronts Lori, Lori pushes her over a cliff, leaving her brain damaged for the rest of her life. In Lori’s mind, she was justified in her abuses because her siblings were holding her back from what was rightfully hers.
After Lori and Abby complete their journey, Lori’s motivations have completely shifted; whereas she initially claimed to be interested in Edmond out of fascination, she now plows forward with delusions that Edmond will love her, he will make her a whole person and the horrific acts she’s committed on her family will be justified. The evil brought to the surface has allowed Lori to shed the connection she has to her sister, a connection that Lori sees as a burden with the silver lining of having power and control over someone who was once more successful than herself. For Abby, the memories of before her accident are long gone and she clings to Lori with child-like love and adoration. In the end, the concepts of right and wrong no longer tether Lori to reality; she got what she came for and the only thing left to do is reunite with Edmund.
The dangers Lori flirts with means nothing to her, because in her mind, she is above those dangers and no amount of blood spilt will convince her otherwise. Lori finds herself surrounded by death almost from the moment her journey begins and as she becomes more unhinged, the dead around her go from unfortunate roadblock to signs of victory. But we know that men like Edmond can’t be changed by a woman who is willing to go to Hell and back for them and Lori eventually discovers this, still desperately clinging to her delusion that love has made its way to her after all being out of reach her whole life. In reality Lori doesn’t know what love is; she is incapable of giving love and only offers hollow platitudes to those whom she finds useful. Even her obsession with Edmond comes back to gaining an advantage over another woman. Lori unknowingly sees any love or kindness given to her by those in her path as nothing more than tools to get what she wants.
In the end, Lori’s comparison of herself to Edmond wasn’t so far off.
Two Named Women 