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.