One figure Carney sketches in A Death on Diamond Mountain is Christine McNally, follower and gate keeper to an American teacher of a Buddhism supposedly based on a Tibetan lineage. He describes her life in a tiny New York City apartment she shared with a roommate and a cat (named Max), before she met the teacher who founded the retreat called Diamond Mountain University.
Carney 's interview published in Shelf Awareness elaborates on his own studies in religion, and interest in people who have killed themselves while supposedly becoming more spiritual:
...[T]he lingering question always was how did a meditation practice that aimed at making people more compassionate and at peace with the world turn out so badly. I looked for other cases of people whose journey into deep meditation turned tragic. I collected seven journals from people who took their own life after retreats. Then, when I was writing a story for Details about spiritual sickness, I learned about how Ian Thorson died on a meditation retreat in the mountains of Arizona and I realized that I wanted to know why someone would want to do a three-year-long retreat in the first place... and what went wrong.
Regarding his audience Carney says:
The entire time that I wrote the manuscript I had three books on my desk that I turned to for inspiration: Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, John Vaillant's The Tiger and Lawrence Wright's Going Clear.
I think A Death on Diamond Mountain will speak to anyone who has ever tried to strive for some sort of spiritual transcendence. I think many people have felt the cusp between madness and divinity. It's a feeling that is common to every religious experience to some degree.
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