A Certain Hunger - Book review #2
Female rage and more
“You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.”
-A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
The novel follows Dorothy - a food critic, serial killer and cannibal - tags she proudly wears. Through exquisite prose, she effortlessly recounts her crimes, as if she is writing food reviews. The result is an intriguing yet purposefully gruesome account of gluttony, lust, and female rage.
The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy… here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.
-A Certain Hunger
The themes of casual and systematic violence perpetrated against women are explored through the narrator’s commentary, even as she unnervingly spells out how she destroys and ends the lives of men she claims to be in love with. The writing is beautiful, though the content horrifying, and reading itself becomes a sensory pleasure - a delicacy to be relished.
Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations.
-A Certain Hunger
The narrator never attempts to justify her murderous tendencies, even as we see glimpses of her suppressed rage at being wronged - being at the receiving end of gendered violence, not feeling like the first choice, being laid off, or being cheated on. Unsettling violence is penned down with poetic ease, in line with Dorothy intellectualising emotions instead of feeling them.
Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone.
-A Certain Hunger
Dorothy wields dirt on men as her weapon. In her youth, she is a ‘girl boss’, and as a middle-aged wealthy woman, she supports women’s rights and wrongs by refusing to be tied down by love, relishing her former lovers instead - just because she can.
What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery?
-A Certain Hunger
It feels strange to like a book even as the experience of reading it is unsettling and the violence within its pages unforgivable. I would recommend it if the girlbossification of American Psycho sounds interesting.
Rating: 4/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Year of publishing: 2020
Year of reading: 2023
Genre: Horror, Literary fiction