Book Review: A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

‘A Certain Hunger’ by Chelsea G. Summers was released in 2020. It was her debut novel. The book follows the life of serial killer, Dorothy Daniels, a famous food writer, who happens to be a cannibal.

The book was alarming, stomach-churning and gripping. I was captivated by the prose, Summers told this story exquisitely, and readers certainly get a feel for Dorothy as a character as the story progresses. There was a lot to unpack when you read this book, and I loved getting glimpses into the mind of this serial killer.

Despite the fact that this book was a thriller, which is a hit-or-miss genre for me, it is certainly a favourite of mine this year, which was incredibly exciting. I love finding stories, and writers that I can keep an eye out for in the future. And with Summers, there was a lot to like. The whole novel is incredibly cleverly written. The matter-of-fact nature of Dorothy’s narration really demonstrated how easy it could be to blend the boundaries between commercial meat, and human bodies. The way that Summers described food, whether it was human meat or a cut of pork, lamb or beef, had that same tone, and due to the broad range of a critic’s pallet, it was clear Dorothy Daniels had eaten a variety of cuts of meat, from rump, to breast, to leg, to offel, thus making the leap to cannibalism easier to stomach as a reader. But I also loved how juxtaposing some of the imagery was, it was jarring to read about eating the shrimp but I was perfectly content reading about how she mutilated her victims to eat cuts of their meat! The narration was so incredibly clever in that respect. How she introduced the idea of cannibalising Giovanni was so blunt, and she retained that same controlled sense of character voice throughout, as if the whole book was one of those long blog posts Dorothy claimed to hate, where there’s a whole rambling story that overshadows an actual recipe.

Furthermore, I loved the poetics and intimacy of how she described Dorothy’s friendship with Emma and how powerful and visceral the imagery was. I found the way that Summers described female friendships using mythological monsters to describe the world women live in. Not only do I adore Greek mythology, so any references to it make me incredibly giddy, but this particular extract had me reeling.

I found it very interesting how anthropological Dorothy was when describing her dining on her exes, justifying the idea of eating people, and how it is a practice that takes place outside of the western world, but the choice to go ahead and do that herself felt a bit too hasty, especially since Summers goes through the effort of justifying that choice by offering examples of other instances of cannibalism.

Something that I will admit I wasn’t a fan of, was the addition of Alex’s character toward the end of the book. Yes it was subversive and deviant for a middle aged woman to rejected a marriage proposal when she very clearly loved Alex but the idea that Dorothy turned around with two or three chapters left of the book and sprung this romance on us felt like it came out of nowhere. Even if her decision to reject Alex’s proposal and instead seek Andrew out was interesting, since she “didn’t like who she became” when she was in love, and thus returned to murder and cannibalism, but it was still an almost jarring and arguably cliche jump from what we expect of women and what we expect of serial killers.

But, that didn’t really ruin the experience for me. After all, there was so much to love about the book, from the way Summers explored navigating female friendships, to how she referred constantly back to notorious female killers thus cementing Dorothy as one of them. You can almost imagine her name among them: Aileen Wuornos, Myra Hindley, Dorothea Puente, Judy Buenoano, Genene Jones and Dorothy Daniels. It was very immersive fiction and I really enjoyed reading it!