A Certain Hunger is a Tasty Morsel

There's a certain irony that, for someone who loves the zombie genre, cannibalism gives me the ick. I mean, it gives most people the ick (or it should, anyway) but for someone who loves both true crime and horror, you would think cannabilism would be a subject I'd interact with more. Instead, I don't avoid it, but I rarely seek it out.

Part of this is because body horror is my least favourite genre of horror. I don't like seeing or hearing about people doing gross things to bodies, alive or dead. I've never watched Silence of the Lambs, or even the promisingly queer Hannibal. I'm halfway through Yellowjackets and am only getting through it because Christina Ricci trumps the aforementioned ick.

So why did I pick up A Certain Hunger [Chelsea G Summers]? Well, mostly because I am an eternal optimist and secretly believe that every book about subjects I outright dislike could still be game-changing. Also, the Overdue boys were reviewing it. 

It tells the story of Dorothy. She's one of those middle-class, cultured, sexually-liberated women who rode the 90s magazine wave and made a fortune doing reporting work that wouldn't even cover your groceries now. Remember how everyone in When Harry Met Sally had those great New York apartments despite putzing around writing insipid lifestyle stuff for magazines? That's her world. She's currently imprisoned as a serial killer, and is writing her memoirs, full of food and sex. 

Dorothy is a delightfully unhinged narrator. She is a stone-cold sociopath, who has done all the same internet quizzes as everyone else has on the subject. No, she doesn't care about hurting other people. Yes, she sees every interaction in terms of the advantage it gives her. She stalks the men she sleeps with, finding out their secrets for fun and using them against them should they behave in a way she doesn't like. 

And she kills and eats men. 

There is no big mystery here. We know what takes her down from the start - a murder she does more-or-less on impulse. It's the last murder she commits and the first murder we hear about. We do find out the exact events that led to her incarceration but there is no big 'aha!' twist, just some filled-in blanks near the end. 

She is writing for her own legacy and in the words of Kathryn Hahn in Parks and Rec, "I don't care enough about you to lie." She can't get any more incarcerated than she already is. She often references you, the reader, reading or listening, with as much sneery judgement as you have for her. 

This is a book about food, about sex (a LOT of sex) and about everything else that Dorothy thinks. Every chapter swerves off on some lecture Dorothy wants to give about some subject - magazines, children, fashion, feminism, New York, Italy, prison, prison food, the death penalty, etc, etc. They are usually either fascinating or relevant, but towards the end they started to tire me, as the author voice bled through too clearly.

You might get some sex tips too - I don't know your life. Dorothy is a deeply sexual creature, who adores the male form. If she isn't describing something in food terms, she's describing it in sexual ones. It kind've loses shock value early on, so frequent is it, and while I'm bisexual there were times where I just sighed and thought 'yeah I'm not straight enough for this'. Luckily, it's rarely meant to be titillating and her lust is often as unsettling as her hunger.

This brings us on to the cannabalism. It didn't freak me out too much in book format, but the book does not shy away from the process, especially when she is given opportunity to do some actual butchering. Human meat, in case you are wondering, tastes like bear, in the sense that regardless of texture or taste, you can never see it as 'meat', it will always be connected to the animal you are consuming.  

Her murders are undoubtedly the most engaging parts of the book - her darkly comical attempt to cut out a tongue whilst bobbing about in a life jacket in the ocean, her detailed murder plan that might all fall apart thanks to the inconsistency of Italian trains - and they keep the narration mostly on track. It's a short book, and so it never drags. 

This is a book where you can enjoy being your darkest, most decadent self. That's something to be savoured. And you'll definitely come out of this with some cooking tips: fennel is the thing to add to lentils, duck fat is overlooked, and tongue is both cheap and amazing (so long as it isn't human).