A Certain Hunger

When I decided to pick up A Certain Hunger, it was because I was craving something unapologetically wrong. There is so much discourse right now about the meanings of the actions of a character, about what stories one should or should not enjoy based on their moral standing, and whether the portrayal of a bad thing (ambiguously, floridly, or with condemnation) renders a work worthless. And it's starting to weigh on me. It seemed that the most dangerous stuff I read in my life I got my hands on as a teenager, and now that I have all the freedom of an adult, I am absorbing media that, in so many different ways, is walking on eggshells. So I wanted something bad, I wanted something violent, I wanted something unforgivable. I wanted something about women doing bad things because they can. And that's exactly what I got.

“Gleeful, we banquet on flesh.”

A Certain Hunger feels like a throwback to how stories used to be told - a person with a story, telling it to someone who wants to know. Except it's the 21st century now, and instead the vampire Lestat or Jonathan Harker, its Dorothy Daniels, a middle-aged self-professed psychopath, murderer of men, and cannibal. A Certain Hunger is her life story, her confession, told trimly and indulgently, with pretension, with dignity and an unbridled love for flesh. All kinds, and in all ways. The grown-ups are talking now, thank you. You will learn more about meat, more about food, and more about bodies than you thought you could in 250 pages.

A book hasn't sung to me like this since the Vampire Chronicles. Summers writes so beautifully, you feel like you could lick the blood off the page. I miss writing like that. A lot of it comes from sheer knowledge - of words, of culture, of food. I simply do not have the vocabulary to replicate a lot of what Summers does here (but I was definitely taking notes). But a lot of it comes from a willingness to play. At one point, Summers used the phrase “festive estival” and I about threw the book across the room. This woman is a menace of a writer and I love her.

I do wish that I had read this when I still thought I was attracted to men. And I will admit, the stories of Dorothy's early life were not that stirring. However, there was still a deep attraction there. It reminded me of myself when I was young - more importantly, who I wanted to be. Who I thought I would be. As it turns out, being a writer in a big city is actually really expensive and lonely, and chewing through men is a cool aesthetic but the reality is men are generally pretty uninteresting. The bit goes cold quickly. But Dorothy is a wish-fulfillment fantasy as much as Cinderella is. A power fantasy - a dream of being both detached enough to not be bothered, but still being able to enjoy the glimmering taste of it all.

I wonder though if I did really get what I wanted. There are several moments where Dorothy chastises and judges the eating habits and bodies of others. Something that I immediately picked up on as “problematic,” and then remembered what book I was reading. So did Dorothy, who promptly pointed out the obvious - she's a fucking cannibal. You're not supposed to think she's right. But you do enjoy it - both her violence and her judgment. “You slip in to the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person,” she says. She's giving you permission. But I wouldn't have minded if we didn't have that permission. I think I would have liked a little bit more mess, a little bit more rot. But maybe even cannibals have their limits.

This book was fantastic! I love to add to my lexical knowledge, and the use of language within this book was just the ticket. I only have one question, and it isn't covered in the book as far as I could see: what made her decide she wanted to taste that first liver? I understand that she is a foodie and was probably curious, and that she is also a Psychopath, and so was probably free of compunction when it comes to this sort of thing, but I would still have liked to read about her thoughts immediately preceding the decision to remove his liver, whatever process switched her mindset from ‘accidentally killed someone” to “but this liver though...”, in her own words.