Rating:

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Author: Chelsea G. Summers

I don’t know any other way to say this, but: I like to read about cannibalism. It’s SCARY, and in a world where everything has been done, redone, re-made, re-imagined, and over-engineered, something actually scary is a horror hound’s nightmare come to throbbing, bloody life. It’s disturbing, unimaginable, sinister, forbidden . . . all the things that check that sensationalism box. What’s not to like?

And so, with little more than the understanding that A Certain Hunger was about a female food critic who, shall we say, liked to take her work home, I snagged the Audible and settled in to be deliciously scandalized. I ended up being bored.

A Certain Hunger is a pretentious lit-fiction wannabe. It, at turns, tries oh-so-desperately to shock you (with words like “fuck” and endless descriptions of the villain’s rather pedestrian sexual appetite) and to impress you (the author has so totally travelled to Italy, and she also knows her way around fancy sounding spices). What actually comes across is a book that is trying way too hard and has nowhere other to go. Cannibal food critic who likes sex but kind of hates men? Got it . . . what are you going to cover for the next 300 odd pages? What happens is a slapdash, outlandish attempt to get Dorothy (said cannibal food critic) to tell her life’s story (memoir-ish) while sounding oh-so-better than you, giving little flash-forwards of what she did and how she was caught so you’ll stick around and mostly saying a lot of nothing for a very, very long time.

We open with sex in front of the fire, an ice pick, and an unconventional meal. So far, so good. Then, we go back and slog for hundreds of pages as Dorothy narrates an ultimately boring life. Dull encounters with men and women. A so-so food critic job. The much-made-of summer in Italy. More monotonous career progression. An enemy in college turned friend. A dreary family. And all the time Dorothy is smugly telling us how she is better, beyond these people. She is telling us, again and again, that she is the rare female psychopath while also opining on what being a psychopath means for her and even how it gets her along in prison. It’s just SOOO tedious and overblown. Surely even a narcissistic psychopath would get bored after awhile?

Image by Dee from Pixabay

Eventually, way further into the book than you would expect, you get the first killing, followed by the cannibalism. And it makes no sense. Ok, so she is a psychopath. It still doesn’t explain why she chose to kill this guy in this moment – so sloppy, so unplanned. Yes, the lack of emotion makes sense, maybe even the curiosity. But isn’t she supposed to be so elite – so smart? And she can’t plan this better? The cannibalism itself never gets an explanation or even much of a thought. Why did she think to do this? A power move? A curiosity? Some kind of feminist sub-meaning (that thinks it’s subtle and clever but has all the voltage of a sick electric eel at low tide). Who knows? And by this point, who cares.

Let me make something clear, in case it’s not already coming through. We hate this character. This is not the cold-blooded villain you love to hate (like Hannibal Lecter who, despite his brain eating tendency, still just had that certain deadly charm). This woman is irritating, solipsistic, torpid, and terminally tepid, what with all her fancy prose mixed with “shocking” cussing.

By the time we get to the gore and killings, we’ve pretty much left the mental headspace of the narrative. And we know it’s a narrative. We’re never in the story, never believing or invested. This book has made it obvious from the beginning that it is very aware of what it is trying to do and trying to do it very, very hard. Result: we’re not impressed. Not shocked. Not scared. Not even really that interested. This is another “mind of the monster” type of book, similar to Victorian Psycho, that mistakes being horrible and nasty for being fascinating and fear inducing. What we get are some dramatized flashes of ugliness and human baseness, intertwined with a few pretty words and a great big mash of affectation and very little action or plot. Not recommend.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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