Chelsea G. SummersRecensioni

The story of Dorothy, a psychopath who indulges in her lack of empathy. Coming from a moderately wealthy family and left an inheritance, Dorothy becomes an exceptionally well-traveled, well-read food critic. She knows the best restaurants and enjoys cooking, describing the both the exotic and traditional dishes she eats, especially in Italy, her adopted second home.
She also relishes finding new lovers, especially if her research on the person turns up something Dorothy can use as leverage in the future. That she can destroy them is always in the back of her mind. As she matures, Dorothy's pleasure in the forbidden includes murder and cannibalism.

It would be too easy to say that Dorothy is a monster and her story is one of vulgar brutality, but that would ignore the times when she discusses the beauty of Italy and the care that goes into the cuisine, or the magazine trade of the 90s, the art of Ivan Albright, how Kosher meat is processed and how the USDA works. All these asides of a page or two combine to show how intelligent and curious Dorothy is about the world. The brutality is mixed with her version of sensuousness, which can be gross, but Summers is a superb writer who has created a fascinating character.½

Beautifully written!

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4/5 Stars – Dark, twisted humour with a murderous narrator is my favourite flavour🍽️

Reading this book reminded me of when I first saw The Young Poisoner’s Handbook on TV when I was a teenager and thought it was absolutely fucking brilliant. It is a black comedy film from 1995 based on the true story of Graham Young – who got sent to Broadmoor at 14 years old for poisoning his family, friends and family. I loved it.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but black comedies about murderous psychopaths really tickle me (see also
Heathers
which I think I first saw around the same time, and
Sight Seers
from 2012).

In book form, I’ve loved (and may never shut up about)

Bunny

with its funny, dark magical realism, and last year I also fell for the twisted mind of Ottessa Moshfegh and her bitter twisted outsiders (of her novels I’ve read Eileen and
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
, I have Lapvona in my TBR but I’m bracing myself for that one!). I also read a few years back
My Sister, the Serial Killer
and loved that one too (highly recommended!). At university I loved reading Angela Carter, and I’d put
Money
and
Other People
by Martin Amis in this category too. I was also remembering reading
The Wasp Factory
by Ian Banks the other day and trying to describe what it was about to my partner! Good God, that book (if you know, you know).

Disturbing, fucked up worlds and selfish amoral characters hold a sick fascination for me.

So when
A Certain Hunger
crossed my path (and by my path I mean, Amazon Kindle deals!) I snapped it right up! I was a little trepidatious because I’d been sorely burned by
How To Kill Your Family
last year which I found to be an overhyped waste of time (a DNF at 15%!). But I had no need to fear – A Certain Hunger is what How To Kill Your Family didn’t have the imagination to be!

Dorothy Daniels
I adored Dorothy as a character, although she is definitely not someone I’d ever want to know! A mid-fifties, successful food critic and now convicted murderer; she is a proud, ruthless psychopath who has always known what she wanted and how to get it. She loves gourmet food and adventurous sex with many men, and somewhere along the way, she developed a taste for the flesh of her lovers.

Dorothy is an unreliable narrator, we only have her word for any of this, including her superiority which she really wants the reader to understand (she is also one of those people who spent a year abroad in Italy, learned Italian and then won’t ever shut up about it). I appreciated that she was not really as smart as she thinks she is, she makes many mistakes in her murders and especially the one she was caught for. The chapter where she kills the guy on a boat really had me laughing!

The Words!

The meat was quite tasty, chewier than beef, certainly, but with an earthy thrum, a kind of truffled bass note, and the piquancy that comes only from the deepest flavor of nostalgia.

The story is told in Dorothy’s words, ostensibly as her prison memoir, and what words they are! Dorothy’s prose are stuffed with the extravagant, visceral – dare I say pompous – words of a sexually charged professional food critic. It made me want to use the word “fecund” more in my everyday life. I have read some reviews that appear to have taken the writing style seriously, but to me, this is clearly a part of the satire. I can’t picture Chelsea G. Summer writing a passage like the one below and not cackling wildly to herself.

A miasma of beef tallow, dirty corn oil, and unwashed man surrounded us. To this day, I can’t look at a Burger King cheeseburger wrapper without feeling my clit twitch. Such is the power of that particular madeleine. I wish I knew that guy’s name. I’d like to look him up.

This must have been such a fun book to write!

But I can’t give it 5 Stars!
As much as this tickled me I can’t give A Certain Hunger a five-star rating. I found it a lot of fun, but it was a surface-level experience. I would put it more in a “beach read” category, it is not Literature it is just entertainment. There is nothing wrong with that, just don’t go into this expecting anything profound (unless it awakens your own inner desire to eat human flesh). It doesn’t stand up against the books I mentioned in my introduction, but sometimes it’s nice to read some “lighter” fucked up shit that won’t give me nightmares when I read it before bed.

Ultimately though, I wished there was a bit more meat to it. I either needed more depth to Dorothy’s motivations (why exactly did she pick her victims, and why murder and eat them in the way she did?) or I needed a cool twist. As it is, the plot is rather predictable and there is very little tension.

Really this might be more of a 3-star read but it gets the extra star because I’m a sicko who just loves this type of book!

I am keen to see what Chelsea G. Summers writes next!

This review was also posted to my Book Blog!



View all my reviews

This one was an *interesting* read. Clever, funny, but oh so dark. It managed to be gruesome without going toooo far. The cheeky humor helped bring some relief to the cold hard mmmmyuuurdur. If you’re up for a dark tale of lady serial killer, this is for you.

Content Warning:
on page s* assualt
graphic violence cannibalism

I'm pretty sure this is a new favorite for me. You can feel the author's knowledge of 18th century British literature. Extensive vocabulary, visceral wordplay, outstanding satire.

It took me a while to read, but I feel like I've never enjoyed a book I've had to keep an oxford dictionary next to--and I loved this fact the whole way.

SPOILERS AHEAD:
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*I've not read many difficult books, and this was a good segue from easier books to a literature

loved:
Emma. Team Emma all the way.
Emma in college, Emma as Tender DeBris, Emma painting, Dorothy cooking for Emma, both getting blasted, Dorothy literally going into detail about the finer points of being a serial killer surviving an attack because she had a silent alarm set while smoking on a fire escape not ratting on her to the cops or the court. That's a best friend, right there. Emma all the way, full stop.

the 4th wall breaks that stared into my soul

prison group therapy

written as a memoir--the POV alone makes it so intriguing.

This was so well written that I often stopped to reread sentences in stunned awe. Very similar to American Psycho with some Hannibal Lector thrown into the mix, it is extremely dark, infused with black humor and deliciously gruesome. I got queasy at some parts, this is not a story for weak stomachs. I loved the overly descriptive ridiculousness of her “foodie” life and ultimately the very feminist bent this novel took. A rare gem that was uncomfortable to read but worth it.

UGH. Really? This author is so in love with her own writing. Intriguing plot, poorly executed (no pun intended).
Would definitely not read anything else from this author.

In this fictional autobiography female food critic and skilled chef Dorothy Daniels recalls her life from a prison cell at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She describes her childhood with a francophile mother and philandering father, her active residence in both America and Italy, her many partners, and her secret taste for human flesh and murder.

I think sex then homicide then cannibalism gets boring the third time around, even if the method of execution and setting is different each time. Also, I didn't think it was in her character to freak out at the end. She should've stayed calm.

"Despite their numbers, brutal women catch us by surprise. We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and football. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we act as starry-eyed as Margarete Keane paintings about the eternal sunshine of the spotless female mind. It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly, and we all did. Some more than others."

The mark of a good writer is if they can make you believe a falsehood. And I don't mean a typical conspiracy or the way propaganda can. Rather, a good writer hones the truth in fiction, so even when you're reading about a nymphomaniac cannibal, you can recognize a common humanity. Dorothy is not a real person, but as the above quote begs us to realize, she's not that far off, either.

The prose here is nothing short of mesmerizing. Thick and steeped in dark humor and loaded with probing questions. It's nothing short of a master's work, and even when the plot became about as dark as an unlit alley, Summers's writing lit the way. I never wanted anything more than to keep reading.

The memoirs of an incarcerated food critic lady cannibal. Stellar.

The one thing I wasn't expecting was how funny I found this, while some of the gorier descriptions really did their best to turn my stomach. I very much loved Summers' writing and language, and at no point did I grow tired with the book. Fascinating, visceral, and witty. What a wild ride.

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.

I almost chose not to review this book. Not because I didn't thoroughly enjoy it, but to be honest, I had no idea how to approach it from a reviewer's point-of-view. To be even more honest, I wasn't sure I wanted my grandmother, who lovingly follows my progress on social media, to read this review. (Grammy I'm sorry for the direction this is about to go!) But buckle up, because here I am, ready to dig into what is mostly likely one of the most fucked-up books I've read this year to date.

Dorothy Daniels is a food critic. She enjoys what she does, and loves sex just as much as she loves food. She also happens to be a discerning and meticulous psychopath, murderess, and high-end cannibal. Told in a memoir-esque style, Dorothy recounts her life, the turbulent path from a seemingly idyllic, homegrown, homestead household, to the moment in which she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, fully embracing her deepest internal desires.

We know from the beginning that this story has an end; that Dorothy is arrested, arraigned, prosecuted, and incarcerated, and she tells us as much in the opening of the book. And yet, it does not stop the book itself from resembling a ball rolling downhill in its tumultuous journey forwards. I felt like I might have been going slowly insane as I read, delving deeper into a strange hypnosis all the while. There's a certain gluttony to this novel in its entirety, a tryptophan-filled dinner that lulls the reader into a deep, unmatched stupor over four courses of a special brand of madness.

And I admit, reading this made me rather hungry. The cannibalism aside, Dorothy is the perfect picture of a sophisticated food critic, dreaming of tantalizing Italian dishes with names and ingredients that I, in all of my Midwestern-grown farm-town ignorance have never heard of, and yet I can feel my mouth watering as Dorothy enlightens me to the world and practiced whims of all of her culinary ways.

Some readers complained about the repetitiveness of these gastronomous name-drops, the pretention of the language, I could only find myself deeper drawn into the lasciviousness of the narrative because of it. I'm not truly sure I liked this novel, only that I enjoyed it. A regrettable and yet delicious meal, if you will.

If you're familiar with the hype around A Certain Hunger when it was first released, it was originally hailed as a criticism of early foodieism, a critique in how gender is defined, and the strained relationship between womanhood and food. In my opinion, it holds up very well in these areas, and showcases a strange understanding of the gender-power dynamic aside.

It's been a few days since I finished this novel and I'm still not sure I've fully digested (hah) my opinions about it or understanding of it, but if I waited until I did, I might never write this review. All I can say is that there's a definite rousing statement being made about the secretive, vicious nature of the female appetite, hidden in public and unleashed in private, but I am perhaps not intellectual enough, or not clear-headed enough to decipher it.

Summers is most definitely in love with metaphor, in love with winding prose and rolling hills of literary class, descriptive language, and pretentious, weighty narrative, and yet for this novel, it works. In my opinion, she's aware of exactly what effect she's having on the reader. It's the literary equivalent of an opulent Tudor feast, and it sits heavy in the stomach long after it's gone. (And here I am, making too many literary-culinary metaphors in Summers' wake).

Likewise, the sexual content is very carnal, very food-adjacent (makes sense given the context of the novel), very shock-factor, harsh-language laden, meant to stir the reader from their feasted stupor. It wasn't appealing, but it was as strange as the rest of the novel and that let it fit right in.

I truly hope Summers will be publishing more fiction in the future, if only so that I can see how well it holds up to my assumption that the heft of this narrative is purposeful and understood.

Overall, I'm left with a strange taste in my mouth and the knowledge that I have tramped down into a spiral of madness and carnal rage and won my way out again, if not with the knowledge that the novel promised, then at least the experience. Like I said, I'm not sure that I liked this novel, only that I enjoyed it. Whatever that means.

I leave you with this: “What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.”

If it's a bit more than a distaff [b:American Psycho|28676|American Psycho|Bret Easton Ellis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436934349l/28676._SY75_.jpg|2270060], it's still not quite as clever as it thinks it is. The prose is lively and stuffed with more fifty-cents words than you can wave an OED at, and there's a humor to the whole thing that makes it a quick listen.

But it engages in that whole [a:Bret Easton Ellis|2751|Bret Easton Ellis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1405340867p2/2751.jpg] thing of collections of brands, places and dishes that feels designed to impress the reader with how experienced and interesting the author is and how many things she knows. Ostensibly this is defensible in the above-mentioned Ellis novel in that one can grasp for a theme being that the narrator is only the brands[1] there. Here it rings a bit more insecure on Summers' part.

Still, it glances off of some interesting ideas about the intersection of violence and gender, and, as mentioned, is quick and mostly fun.
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[1] The amazing Mary Herron movie of that book makes this much more clear and other things besides. Watching that film twenty times is a better use of your time than the Ellis novel, truthfully.

Maybe this book suffered from my high expectations, but I went into this expecting succulent, unctuous, biting satire and was disappointed by what I found. The second half was much better than the first, but it wasn’t good enough to make up for the slog of the first half. You wouldn’t think sex and cannibalism could be quite so boring as this.

Amazing. I really need Chelsea Summers to write another book.

Dorothy Daniels would quite literally eat Patrick Bateman as an hors d'oeuvres, and pick her teeth with Hannibal Lecter's finger bones. Beautifully written, and delightfully disturbing.