I really got into that first novel she wrote. It was about this grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park that had lost its fear of humans and was running around eating everybody. The story line was pretty good, even if her dialogue did suck, and she somehow knew how to make all these narrative hooks. For instance, getting one of the characters into a tight squeeze, then cutting to another chapter so that you’d rush along to see what was going to happen. And she invented all these people. That was what amazed me. She just made up all these people out of her mind. I mean people that were nothing like us. It was all about these park rangers who were trying to kill this bear. Most of them had bad marriages, but one of them, this young guy named John, was a newlywed. He was a real upright guy, loved his wife and all that, was dedicated to the Park Service. But his buddy, Jesse, had this wife who looked like Ann-Margret and was always coming on to him. Okay. Then, there was this other ranger named Walker, who’d already been dipping his wick into Jesse’s wife, Glenda, and this Walker dude was sort of nuts. But he kept it carefully hidden. He was a big muscled-up mean motherfucker with a temper like a short fuse. John had this other friend, Ben, who knew what was going on between Walker and Glenda, but he didn’t say anything. (You know how that shit goes if one of your friends’ wives has ever been messing around on him and you didn’t want to tell him. I mean, you’re sort of caught in the middle. You can tell your friend, and risk him knocking the shit out of you and calling you a liar, or keep your mouth shut and feel like a bastard for not telling him.) So that’s what old Ben was going through. He had a wife, too, but she was almost nonexistent in Judy’s novel. All these park rangers were running around trying to kill this man-eating bear, and the bear was killing their dogs and eating campers. They had a bunch of close encounters with the bear, missed some shots and things, and then close to the end of it, old Jesse went one-on-one with this bad Ursus Horribilus, missed his shot, and got killed. Very painfully. That was a heartbreaker. I liked old Jesse. And right after that, old Ben almost went crazy because he hadn’t told Jesse that Glenda was messing around on him with Walker. And then he really went crazy. He beat the shit out of this other dude named Tommy, who’d been messing around with Glenda a few years before, and they kicked him off the Park Service. And see, that left John and this maniac Walker to kill the bear. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I imagined all sorts of bad things happening. What I figured was going to happen was that Walker was going to rape John’s wife, and John would come in and catch them in bed at the same time he found the bear going through the garbage in his backyard, and there’d be this big incredible scene of bloodshed and retribution right at the end. But the ending was so disappointing that I don’t even want to talk about it.