Violence against women is normalized, is expected, in male antagonists and protagonists alike in A Certain Hunger, the violence is almost exclusively against men by the hands of women. Dorothy is a bad person in a way that only men have been allowed to be in mainstream media. She avoids simply #girlbossing the protagonist, thank God, but makes sure Dorothy is at least a bit relatable to the modern woman. No topic is avoided, but no topic is overdone.Īs if this weren’t enough, Summers makes poignant takes on feminism, capitalism, classism. Similarly, the animal cruelty is very limited, which is especially difficult if you’re writing about food. She doesn’t avoid it – this is from the perspective of a serial killer, after all – but it’s somewhat tasteful, somewhat matter-of-fact.

But then, I am an excellent cook.”įor all of its obvious grotesqueness, Summers doesn’t overdo the gore, which I was grateful for. A man might have “yeasty beastliness,” young women “gleam with promise and promiscuity.” When justifying her cannibalism, Dorothy explains, “To eat people is to get the taste of a Titan. I could flip to any page, point to any sentence, and be in awe of the wit, the well-deserved arrogance.

Summers insists that you savor the novel like a good meal. So while this may be a slow read, that’s kind of the point. Dorothy gets what she wants, and she wants you to read. It demands that you read every perfectly grotesque word, parse every revoltingly engineered sentence. With almost no dialogue, the book reads in long paragraphs, often jumping around in flashbacks and flashforwards, or whatever Dorothy decides she wants us to know. You can guess what camp Dorothy falls in. Thus brings about the central theme of the book – being good and boring, or bad and entertaining. The thing about Dorothy is that no matter how evil she is, villainous and psychopathic (her own words) she never fails to be interesting. It’s one of the stranger books I’ve read (for obvious reasons) but also one of the best. Writing from prison, Dorothy has no reason to lie the novel is a fictional autobiography, tell-all, confessional. Summers is told from the perspective of Dorothy Daniels, a food-critic-turned-cannibal, after she’s been caught. I didn’t expect a book about cannibalism to make me hungry, but I also didn’t expect a book about cannibalism to be so good.

Book a certain hunger