WMG / The Secret History

• One popular interpretation is the "Cougar Theory," which holds that the farmer — whose death kicks off the entire plot — was fatally mauled by a cougar, not by any of the Classics kids. In this theory, when Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis awoke from their Dionysian trance, they found the farmer dead, and assumed (due to their mutual It's All About Me tendencies) that they must have killed him. In other words, had they simply told someone right away, they could have avoided everything that ensued.