A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

One of Vanity Fair's Books That Will Get You Through This Winter
“One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory... A Certain Hunger has the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel, as if metaphor-happy Raymond Chandler handed the reins over to the sexed-up femme fatale and really let her fly." ―The New York Times

Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy’s clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both.

But there is something within Dorothy that’s different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world’s most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Thriller, Contemporary, Feminism, Literary Fiction, Adult

254 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2019

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

cannibalism may not be morally sound. but if you're willing to believe in yourself...it can be girlboss.

this is a book about a female food critic (rad) who has a lot of sex (rad) and sometimes murders and eats men (admit it: also rad).

it also takes itself Extremely Seriously, and is Very Try-Hard, and has so much Overly Formal Prose of the variety that always seems like the author went back and tried to make it sound fancier.

for these reasons, i unshelved it as lit fic halfway through - try as it might, this is more general-fiction-beach-read than it likes to admit.

not that there's anything wrong with that. when i accepted it, it was a pretty good time.

it's also both intentionally and unintentionally pretentious, falling short of the standard it's setting for itself, which is a little less easy to forgive.

but then, i'm a hater.

it's the girlboss in me.

bottom line: feminist win!

---------------
pre-review

try as you might: a cannibal-food-critic book is always going to be more goofy than it is elegant.

but that doesn't mean it can't be fun.

review to come

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currently-reading updates

this has the chance to be one of those books i make into my whole personality.

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tbr review

i think i am in love with this book already

[Tess Fragoulis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overwritten, meandering, obvious and self-conscious. I love a good psychopath story, but this one is just word salad and window dressing.

[m. · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don't believe in the glorification of murder. i do believe in the empowerment of women.

[cass · Rating 4 out of 5]

we as a society should normalize milf cannibals

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

i hope this doesnt awaken something in me

[mackenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

the feminine urge to slowly progress from being a food critic to eating men

[aliyyah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I support women’s rights but more importantly, I support women’s wrongs.

[Stacy (Gotham City Librarian) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it to page 121 and then I had to stop. There aren't enough modern novels out there about cannibals, and unfortunately this was a disappointment. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a narrator that was so hostile towards the reader. She’s a narcissist, fair enough. But characters that manage to get away with this also have a charming personality that we can’t resist. The narrator of this book literally says “You must worship me,” but does nothing to earn it. She goes on endlessly about how amazing she is and how everyone else in the world is a piece of shit, while offering up no common ground to hold onto, no reason to care about her and no flaws to drag her down to your level.

Every time I picked this book up to read it I felt as if the author’s mouth was pressed to my ear hotly whispering, “Are you shocked yet?! How about now?!” You will get to know this character’s vagina more intimately than you know your best friend, because there are no metaphors in the book about anything else.

I think we all knew someone in college who spent a semester abroad and when they came back they would not shut up about whatever European country they went to and how they were now the expert on that country and how perfect and romantic it was and now everything else in their life sucked in comparison. There are chapters in this book about Italy and the narrator is the most obnoxious snob ever about it. Like, we get it. You love Italy and you want to fuck it and you basically did fuck it.

Quite a few people are comparing this character to Hannibal Lecter and I must protest. He despises rudeness and he would absolutely loathe this bitch. Someone else compared the book to American Psycho. I can see the connection, but in my own personal opinion even Patrick Bateman is more lovable than this narrator.

It takes forever to get to any cannibalism and the one thing I WILL say is that once it finally does, all this other bullshit takes a very brief backseat and the actual stuff that I was reading the book for in the first place was not bad. It was even kind of good. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long before the story turned back into an autobiography of this character's exciting and erotic career as a perfect and revered food critic in New York. I just couldn't do it anymore. Life is too short to read books that you don’t like.

[Hayley]

a woman killing men…exactly what i like to read about!

[sin · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm seriously appalled. i mean, if hot milf dorothy parker wants to fuck men and eat them afterwards we should let her

[маја · Rating 4 out of 5]

the feminine urge to kill people and eat their organs

[büşra · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf 52% wasted enough time on this already
1. top reviews are absolutely deceiving this is neither fun nor feminist nor anything else remotely positive
2. it was so incredibly boring and like this woman goes around eating men you might think it would be at least a tiny bit entertaining....no it isn't!!!!
3. never read a pov so obviously made to be "badass" "edgy" yet so try hard ... she just read like a boomer desperately trying to make herself appear cool and fresh when shes just so pathetic
4. whatever the author had in mind about commentary on sex gender etc etc i pretend i never read those ... grossed out and repulsive... maybe that's the point but well not working for me
5. one star for those rare moments she didn't talk about how cool and cunning she was or about the absolutely boring men she "f**ked and ate" but about other women in her life she cared about... those were the only moments in this book i could read without frowning

[natasza · Rating 4 out of 5]

when i die an insufferable milf is allowed to eat my tongue

[daniella ❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

my number 1 toxic trait is i keep justifying the questionable actions of unhinged women characters

[schadenfreude · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is the most white feminist book i've ever read. it was racist, grotesque, classist, antisemitic, and added nothing to any of the conversations it was desperately trying to grab onto.
first of all, "when a woman finally embraces her superiority"? you forgot about a receipt inside of a trash can and thought a house fire was going to magically melt it. you killed a jewish man in "kosher" style and described it vividly for many, many pages. you have no superiority. this main character was so unlikable and stupid that i frankly cannot understand how anyone besides a white woman could possibly relate to her in anyway. she's been rich and/or comfortable her entire life, yet she still thinks she knows what struggling is like. being gross and crass, from an authors perspective, does not immediately make your writing good. if that were true, i'd just go read game of thrones vivid assault scenes or something. i can very clearly tell this author has watched gone girl several times and calls it peak feminist media. the main character lying to us like the students is slightly clever but right after it, she turns into an edgelord which completely erases the possibility of enjoying the previous area. i also found it very strange that the author wrote in the character to say that feminism should acknowledge racists as psychopaths instead of a societal problem. it was either very badly worded or a freudian slip. the main character is simply a pathetic person who likes attention and nothing else, she's hyper-sexual and very grotesque about it on purpose, but that's about it. she's not a girlboss and if anything, i think this book demonizes the hypersexuality she speaks of rather than treating it like a trait some people just have. emma is very strange as a character and also not a girl boss like the author wishes we would believe her to be. at one point, dorothy, the main character, says that she has information that could "destroy congress". first of all, ok edgelord, but second of all, you don't need any proof to destroy congress, they already say and do racist things all the time in real life without care. she's acting like she's some coding specialist when she can barely remember to discard receipts properly. later in the book, she uses her white woman tears to get help from a cop and lie to him at the same time. she also calls makeup armor, which is again, a white feminist take. she continues on to say that the catcalls of men were a comfort to her and that she finds her assault to be fascinating. i honestly don't even have words there, i believe the author and this character are both awful people because i can't fathom who could possibly write something like this in a supposedly feminist book without losing their moral integrity. later on, dorothy goes on to fetishize jewish men and glorify rome, two very bad things to put together. she starts saying extremely embarrassing things about how having sex is equal to wanting to eat people or something. the author of this book really tried to be pro-woman but ended up making it anti-woman when she made the secretary character magically not wear underwear for absolutely no good reason, even furthermore, making her some kind of sex doll. is this really the way dorothy and chelsea see other women? later on, dorothy drugs andrew and still tries to have sex with him anyhow, effectively trying to rape him. being crude and vile does not make good writing.

dorothy also compares herself, a white gentile woman, to anne frank, which is made even worse by something else we have to discuss later on regarding this book.

apparently, the genius psychopath who can hack into things that would "destroy congress" forgets how a gps works, by the way.

this entire book is a white femcel fantasy. she is killing a jewish man because he won't have sex with her anymore and spends the entire book whining and lashing out about what she can't have.

here's what i think was one of the worst things this book, and by extension the author chelsea, did:

dorothy starts talking about killing her ex beau, a jewish man. she starts talking about killing him in a kosher way. she spends many, many pages being antisemitic and rapey. dorothy states that if this jewish man will not give his consent for her to fuck him and instead holds fast to his religious morals, she will kill him. she states, directly, that she wants him to leave his faith behind. she brags about killing him in a "jewish way". she makes the death of a jewish man purposefully look like a satanic killing.

then she goes on to state that, basically, technology sucks and fucking chefs is too far for her, but drugging and raping people isn't.

the other worst thing i think this book did is, later on when dorothy is in the process of being caught, she becomes very antiblack. chelsea keeps having dorothy describe one of the detectives as having, and i quote, "snaking dreads". she implies the detective is poor because she hasn't had blossoming onions to make her fat, yet was mocking the idea of her possibly being fat not that long ago.

oh, also, dorothy admits to killing her sister's cat as a child, for unknown reasons.

in page 185, she actually drops a full on slur. she says, and i quote, that the detective is a "medusa haired, long island [insert slur here]". dorothy cannot stop mentioning the dreadlocks and makes a very long winded speech about cannibalism being natural.

she also goes on to say "well-bred italians" are the best. whatever that means.

dorothy honestly believes herself better than criminals so she refuses to hang out with them, instead choosing to get caught rather than forge a false id and passport to leave the country.

the entire concept of dorothy having a meltdown and starting to blame emma makes absolutely no sense. dorothy was suspected way before she ever even POSSIBLY told emma anything, at all. so that entire plot point is either a huge plot hole by chelsea or it's yet again another example of how stupid dorothy is.

at times, chelsea shows a bit of clarity within her characters, only to throw it out very quickly after. for example, dorothy admits to being white and privileged one page. in the next, she calls people her inferiors and says she has a hard time being kind to "her inferiors". she then goes on to talk about white men and how awful they are, as if she isn't talking about her brethren of whom she directly profits from and will never be truly oppressed by.

here's how dorothy got caught, by the way: the supposedly intelligent psychopath threw away a receipt near the crime scene and forgot that trash cans don't magically melt when near a fire, unless they themselves are on fire. yet again, either a plothole or another showing of her stupidity, though i don't know which one makes me want to scream more.

dorothy then goes on a victim tirade of how brutally women are treated in the justice system and how brutal everyone is to her. emma, being a weirdo just like dorothy, allows dorothy to assault her (almost) and get away with it.

so here is the part of the book where we get the "sad backstory" reveal. apparently, dorothy once loved a man who sucked toes. she goes on for a very long time about men who suck toes and how rare they are. she says this is the one man she ever loved. this book, marketed as a feminist female friendship and bond discussion, spends 200+ pages detailing men and then has dorothy protect the only man she's ever loved, throwing in gender essentialism about how female killers kill for fun while men do it for violence.

i get that chelsea, by showing dorothy deny alex's proposal, is trying to show that dorothy chose herself instead of alex and a life with alex, that she chose to remain who she is instead of becoming "just his wife", but in reality, all it shows is that she decided to destroy her and his life out of a pitiful desire to be unique. which, by the way, she very much is not.
dorothy is the most bland character i have ever read. ever. and i read the bell jar, so that's saying something.

dorothy then begins describing the inmates by race and chelsea decides it would be such a smart idea to name the black inmate, and i quote, "laquisha".

furthermore, how does emma not saying anything abt the many people dorothy killed show a sign of female friendship? isn't one of the earliest memories of this "friendship" dorothy having sex in emma's bed without her consent, thus making emma have to move out? so emma protects the person who tried to assault her and actively slaughtered a jewish man in the worst way possible, but we're supposed to think this is a great act of loyalty? frankly, emma and dorothy are both badly written characters who deserve no praise.

in the acknowledgments, chelsea thanks two black women: beyonce and janelle monae, for being her background music while she worked.

how exactly do you get to write a racist white woman based upon your own racist ideals for over 200 pages and then thank two black women as if that vindicates you?

my final thoughts are this: i bought this book because i liked the cover. i adore things that look like alexandre cabanel's work. reading what it was about before i bought it, however, led me to know that i was going to be let down. i did not expect this book to be good.

but, by god- i did not expect it to be this bad either. this was pure hot dog water. absolute garbage. i would never, ever, recommend this to another human being.

do not buy this book.

[ava ୨୧ · Rating 5 out of 5]

the way annoying incels feel about patrick bateman is the exact way i feel about dorothy daniels

[Max Moroz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite literally slays

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

“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. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.”

This is the fake memoir of popular food critic Dorothy Daniels - she adores food, adores sex - oh and she happens to be a serial killer who eats parts of her victims!

Daniels is a cold and cunning woman - ok you’d probably expect that given the fact that she’s a serial killer, but she makes no attempt to charm her readers, however, her one liners stop you in your tracks, on the one hand shocking you in the calm and distanced manner in which she describes killing and eating parts of her victims, while on the other, the accompanying dialogue is so damned amusing at times that you can’t help but chuckle. She has a huge appetite for both food and sex and indulges to her heart’s content! *A word of warning* this is not for the squeamish, with graphic and gory descriptions of killing and eating the offal of Dorothy’s former lovers!

*Thank you to Netgalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for my ARC in exchange for an honest unbiased review *

[che · Rating 5 out of 5]

almost two months later, and i still think about the “Where do you buy your meat?” scene.

[anu · Rating 2 out of 5]

i will no longer be taking “feminine rage” book recommendations from white women

[persephone ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

can’t the world allow a woman to have a little girl dinner once in a while ??

[- · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Italy, a peninsula that juts like Europe's tasty cock into the briny twat of multiple oceans." bitch, shut the fuck up.

[verynicebook · Rating 1 out of 5]

A Certain Hunger follows food writer Dorothy Daniels, who is also a convicted serial killer. Daniels narrates the story of her crimes from prison, moving back and forth in time between her life behind bars and the life that led to her imprisonment: specifically the food she ate, including eating men.

I did not enjoy A Certain Hunger. I found it meandering, monotonous, vapid and pretentious. I know it's more satirical, and I know Dorothy is supposed to be unlikeable; I'm not one to dislike books with such characters (which is why I expected to love this like everyone else), but there was something missing for me with this one. Every one of her lovers, and the killings seemed the same — quite frankly, every chapter felt the same to me! Except for her killing and eating her victims, nothing that exciting happened. It was attempting to be shocking and risqué, but it really just made me cringe. I understand what the author was trying to do, blurring the lines between sex, food and murder, but I feel like it’s fairly obvious from the start.. it felt like the story was going in circles and I just got bored. I’m sorry, please don’t come for me, I really tried with this one.

If you decide to pick this up I hope you enjoy it more than I did, I seem to be in the minority anyways!

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

a good read which desperately needed more cannibalism and less Italy

[Caitlin Bronson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh, this book. Murderous, cannibalistic cougar food critic got my attention, but it was like the author stopped at that idea herself and never went further. Apparently this was meant to be a sort of “Hey, women can be evil, too” treatise, but instead of developing that idea we get chapter after chapter of our psychopathic narrator detailing all the food and sex she has, and the endless murders and consumption of her lovers.

I don’t mind reading from the POV of a psychopath, but it’s a sin to force your reader to endure the POV of a *boring* psychopath. Dorothy describes herself as a “howling void” and the point is that she doesn’t have a soul, but it’s more appropriate because she doesn’t have a personality. She expresses the same three ideas ad nauseum until the very, very end when she says one thing that could have been a sustainable thesis for this book. But again, it wasn’t developed.

This book really wants to shock you, but it’s more akin to when your baby cousin comes home for Thanksgiving his freshman year of college and has taken one film class and started smoking clove cigarettes and is ready to throw down against all his boring normie relatives at the dinner table.

Don’t believe the reviews. This is just bad.

[selina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"she killed and ate men." so? i applaud her for it

[spillingthematcha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not support cannibalism, but i really, really do love women.
•
Moją miłość do dziwnej literatury ukształtowało wiele książek, ale „Ten Głód” był niewątpliwie jedną z pierwszych. Ponad rok temu ta książka zachwyciła mnie nie tylko genialne rozpisanym portretem psychologicznym głównej bohaterki, ale przede wszystkim efektem szoku i niepokoju, jaki wzbudzała we mnie wraz z każdym rozdziałem. To książka doskonale napisana, pełna gniewu i cielesności, zawarta nie tylko poprzez motyw kanibalizmu, ale również niezwykle dosadne, niemal mięsiste opisy. Czytanie jej jest jakże niekomfortowym przeżyciem, wymagającym dużego wyjścia poza strefę komfortu, co tylko potwierdza jak nietuzinkowa jest ona w swoim założeniu. Od momentu poznania tej książki jest to jeden z moich absolutnych literackich ulubieńców. Makabryczna, kompletna i groteskowa - literacka uczta dla każdego miłośnika literatury.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has no business being so well written.

In conception, this is a B-movie of a novel, a flashy idea, a sexy lead, and a lot of blood. Dorothy is a food critic and, over time, she develops a taste for killing and eating her many lovers. She comes clean about her guilt and conviction in the opening pages, so there isn’t much narrative tension. It’s just a woman writing her murderous memoir while she adjusts to the constraints of prison.

If I’d known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have started. Thank goodness I didn’t know, though, because, in ways that are hard to describe, Summers is a brilliant prose stylist.

It’s often just a matter of a quick hit, a did-she-really-just-say-that drive-by one liner. Dorothy describes meeting a formerly meek college roommate who briefly becomes a performance artist as “like a Filene’s Basement Patti Smith spouting Andrea Dworkin.” Or, later, she says of her mother who’s dying of cancer, “She smelled of Chanel No. 5 and necrosis.”

Other times it’s a more sustained academic critique. As she meditates at one point, “I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche. Mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger. Both establishments serve chopped beef, but one is indiscriminate to the point of ubiquity whereas the other is carnal dining at its bespoke finest.”

As I say, there’s no reason an over-the-top sexploitation style story should be so thoughtfully rendered, but thank goodness it is.

I confess that I wish there were more of a sustained narrative here. The convention of our narrator reviewing her experiences means that there isn’t much for her to learn here. She’s just recounting her crimes and reflecting on the relationship among killing, eating and sex.

There are times when we get a glimpse of a feminist critique of violence and consumption, but it’s usually done quickly and playfully. Our narrator (and our author) is well-informed, but she doesn’t feel the need to enlighten us.

Instead, we move toward an ending which simply echoes the beginning. There are even a couple of near-the-end chapters that seem gratuitous to me, a fleshing out of the great execution of the whole conceit.

So, I ding this a star (or maybe just half a star) for falling short as gripping narrative, but that’s almost beside the point.

What makes this so remarkable is the same choice skill that makes one cook better than another. Summers writes with humor and precision. It feels like fine dining with words, or at least verbal fusion cooking. Think of lingua al fredo, or maybe a salad of romans lettuce. It’s a cleverness that runs throughout.

When you read this, you’ll know you’re in good literary hands. If you can remotely handle the subject matter, pick this up. I can’t imagine anyone doing it any better.

[frankie · Rating 2 out of 5]

the more i read this the more i realized i actually hated it
there is SO LITTLE story and the rest of it is padded out with deeply boring facts about the history of the cleaver, kosher meat preparation, the definition of a serial killer, etc

i found it very boring and so overwritten it was hard to get through. it felt like the author knew i was here for the horror, made me suffer through tons of unnecessary filler, and then was wildly straight to the point and brief when the horror did finally come up

i also just dgaf about books with a central food motif. endless descriptions and similes about decadent luxurious foods that i have no frame of reference for because i’m a regular human being

[Nikola]

DNF 100/360 stron
Absolutnie ani trochę nie obchodzi mnie co będzie dalej