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Dinner Date
Every relationship has needs. His are bloody.
Diederick is a shapeshifting monster who catfishes and eats women. Angela, meek and infatuated, cleans up after him.
Their partnership works until a woman survives him and ends up trapped in their basement. Forced into daily contact with a person Diederick plans to devour, Angela can no longer distance herself from the horrors she helps him carry out.
Dinner Date is a horror novella with a dark sense of humor about complicity, intimacy, and the price of feeding toxic love.
Diederick is a shapeshifting monster who catfishes and eats women. Angela, meek and infatuated, cleans up after him.
Their partnership works until a woman survives him and ends up trapped in their basement. Forced into daily contact with a person Diederick plans to devour, Angela can no longer distance herself from the horrors she helps him carry out.
Dinner Date is a horror novella with a dark sense of humor about complicity, intimacy, and the price of feeding toxic love.
111 pages, Paperback
Published June 19, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 12, 2026
A very good book about the dangers of abusive relationships, woman-eating shapeshifting monsters, and how dangerous a lack of self-esteem can be. The true horror of the story is how real it can feel.
July 17, 2026
4.5 Stars
While this book is not part of a trilogy, I am going to start my review by talking about trilogies with an overtly apt dinner metaphor:
Writing a trilogy - especially the second book in a trilogy - can be exceedingly difficult. You have to balance writing a cohesive narrative across three books while making each book a complete story in itself. I frequently say to people that you can't think of it as a three course meal so much as a three day menu and each dinner needs to be a complete meal. Each meal should begin with an appetizer, move on to the main course and end with a satisfying desert. Just so, at the end of each book, I should be satisfied: our characters started in one place, suffered adversity, changed in some way, and even if the loose ends are not wrapped up, they should end the book differently than they started.
Dinner Date is fairly short, even for a novella, and yet it is a full and satisfying meal. Beyond clearing the bar of having a beginning, middle, and end and having characters who are different at the end of the book than when they started, there are overtones of stronger themes around self-esteem/self-worth and how that plays into toxic relationships. While it's not overly subtle, it never hits you over the head with it either. The messaging is as clear as the more story-driven prose which makes it accessible to those who might not ordinarily read deeper than surface level.
The book also succeeds on a story level. I laughed aloud at least two or three times which is more than I can say for some other more broadly distributed "humorous" books lately. This is not a horror-comedy by any means, but Meredith wields the comedic relief very effectively, keeping the reader engaged and providing a welcome contrast from some of the more unpleasant bits of this bloody tale. I do feel that the relationship between two members of this small cast -Angela and Valentina- maybe needed a bit more time to breathe and grow, but it's a small quibble in an otherwise strong debut novella.
It's short, digestible and satisfying. It's the kind of book you can easily read in one sitting cover to cover, and walk away feeling it was an excellent use of your time. In an era where authors seem to be competing to see who can fill the most pages with unnecessary fluff, Dinner Date's efficient dopamine delivery is the perfect book for those who can't ordinarily "find the time" to read. Maybe we need more books like this in general.
While this book is not part of a trilogy, I am going to start my review by talking about trilogies with an overtly apt dinner metaphor:
Writing a trilogy - especially the second book in a trilogy - can be exceedingly difficult. You have to balance writing a cohesive narrative across three books while making each book a complete story in itself. I frequently say to people that you can't think of it as a three course meal so much as a three day menu and each dinner needs to be a complete meal. Each meal should begin with an appetizer, move on to the main course and end with a satisfying desert. Just so, at the end of each book, I should be satisfied: our characters started in one place, suffered adversity, changed in some way, and even if the loose ends are not wrapped up, they should end the book differently than they started.
Dinner Date is fairly short, even for a novella, and yet it is a full and satisfying meal. Beyond clearing the bar of having a beginning, middle, and end and having characters who are different at the end of the book than when they started, there are overtones of stronger themes around self-esteem/self-worth and how that plays into toxic relationships. While it's not overly subtle, it never hits you over the head with it either. The messaging is as clear as the more story-driven prose which makes it accessible to those who might not ordinarily read deeper than surface level.
The book also succeeds on a story level. I laughed aloud at least two or three times which is more than I can say for some other more broadly distributed "humorous" books lately. This is not a horror-comedy by any means, but Meredith wields the comedic relief very effectively, keeping the reader engaged and providing a welcome contrast from some of the more unpleasant bits of this bloody tale. I do feel that the relationship between two members of this small cast -Angela and Valentina- maybe needed a bit more time to breathe and grow, but it's a small quibble in an otherwise strong debut novella.
It's short, digestible and satisfying. It's the kind of book you can easily read in one sitting cover to cover, and walk away feeling it was an excellent use of your time. In an era where authors seem to be competing to see who can fill the most pages with unnecessary fluff, Dinner Date's efficient dopamine delivery is the perfect book for those who can't ordinarily "find the time" to read. Maybe we need more books like this in general.
July 14, 2026
Highly recommend this amazing writer!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews