A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

Gaslight gatekeep girlhomicide

Keeping on the theme of weird women and food, my latest read is often referred to as American Psycho but it’s a woman who is kind of a gaslight gatekeep girlboss and really slaaaays. A Certain Hunger is a treatise on really good food, interwoven with scenes of really unbridled violence.

See:

You can live without many things, but to live without duck fat is the very essence of privation.

Shortly after followed by:

I pulled the ice pick out, and crimson jets spurted rhythmic and sure. It was a metronome of blood, a ticking of the heart’s time, told in rich red. I stabbed again.

And then there’s a section about how the ice pick impales the guy’s eye and there’s slime and stuff. Honestly it is so uncomfortable but I couldn’t stop reading.

What also makes me uncomfortable however, is the fact that the prose is kind of pretentious in a way that makes me kind of like it? Between the chi-chi writing, the obnoxious namedrops (she references Thomas Keller, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, and includes a whole list of women killers on page 24), this book is over-the-top camp. But it is fun!

The narrator can basically be summed up as cannibal-food-critic-MILF-girlboss-man-murderess. So I mean, this book is fun in a sort of mad, balmy, kooky way that reminds me of Tampa by Alissa Nutting (which, btw is a huge trigger warning for Boylita content).

A random thought: Dorothy Daniels is the new Amy Dunne, who was most definitely Tyler Durden for women. I’m actually loving that we now have an increasing amount of sociopathic women characters in the media — men who kill women is such a fucking cliché at this point; I want to read about more Bad Women!

I like how the book started off with a little history lesson on the Corpse Reviver #2 cocktail. The mini treatises on all sorts of food and raw meat sprinkled throughout the book and the light peppering of graphic murder scenes also kept me on my toes. Yeah, the narrator is deranged and toffee-nosed and she eats men, but I can see myself having a meal with her (“no human for me, thanks”). I’m sure she could teach me a thing or two about savouring my food.

Bechdel test: PASS

Rating: 3.5