Using a single point of view in a novel can heighten intensity, creating an immediate intimacy between character and reader. We learn to see the world through their eyes. This approach is particularly effective when the character is someone who lives outside the confines of society, as is the case with the charming sociopathic narrator of Chelsea G Summers’ debut novel A Certain Hunger.
Dorothy Daniels, a well-known American food critic turned serial killer, is a year into a life sentence at Bedford Hills Prison in New York, after getting away with murder — and cannibalism — for decades. Over 19 titled chapters, with headings such as Corpse Reviver #2, Banana Bread and Silage, Dorothy writes down her story from prison, longing, like all good sociopaths, to go down in history for her terrible crimes.
Summers has great fun with her character. Dorothy is a 6ft-tall redhead whose voracious appetite, for sex, food, power and fame results in plenty of gossipy, drama-laced tales from a range of brightly drawn backdrops — a liberal arts college in Vermont, a year abroad in Italy, the staid nightlife of 1980s Boston, and by contrast, the hedonism of 1990s New York.
The tone is satirical throughout, sustaining many ludicrous twists and turns. It makes sense that the book was first published in America as an Audible Original. The sardonic, confiding voice is perfectly suited to monologue. This decision to tell rather than show lessens the dramatic impact at times, but for the most part the story is kept afloat through mordant humour and Summer’s ability to craft a decent sentence.
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On one of many early mornings partying in New York, Dorothy takes a moment to consider the city: “As I stepped out into the gimlet dawn, sunlight was beginning to slip like white lies between the skyscrapers.” Earlier in the book, she moves home to be near her dying mother, “the great black roses of cancer blooming in her lungs”. These chapters that chart the character’s back story as a child, teen and college student are some of the most affecting and convincing in the book.
At 12, Dorothy imagines throwing a lavish dinner party for all her future lovers: “I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power— and I wanted power even then.” Her mother, meanwhile, is a brilliant chef and Francophile, with strong overtones of Julia Child (she even uses her catchphrase), one of many foodie nods throughout.
These vibrant early chapters don’t quite gel with the rest of the narrative. Summers is careful to present Dorothy’s path to murderous cannibal as incremental — the first killing is an accident, the second for revenge until it becomes something of an addiction — but there is still a mismatch in tone and style, where the early chapters feel real, like lived experience, and the latter entirely fictional.
Further issues include a tendency to summarise an event before circling back to flesh out (pun intended) the details. Some readers won’t make it past the opening pages; there is murder, cannibalism, graphic sex, lots of the c-word, and most nauseating of all, Summer’s delight in mixing sex and food metaphors. Here’s a sample (not the worst by far), where Dorothy describes semen “[drying] on my belly like donut glaze”.
Others will revel in the campness, the gore, the brashness, and the clever gender reversal at the heart of A Certain Hunger. This is Bret Easton Ellis in heels. One can’t help imagining the outcome of a date between Patrick Bateman and Dorothy Daniels, where a chainsaw would be no match for the wily and varied methods employed by the latter throughout the book.
These escapades are teed up with arresting, comic lines: “Giovanni. I killed him, and ate his liver. It was an accident, of course.” There is the sense throughout of a brave writer who pushes things to their limits. Nothing is sacred: “I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. Children make me turn on the oven and reach for the rosemary.”
Summers is an American freelance journalist whose work focuses on sex, politics, tech, fashion and culture. She is a former academic and professor with PhD training in 18th-century British literature. Her work has appeared in VICE, Fusion, Hazlitt, New Republic, Racked and the Guardian. She splits her time between New York and Stockholm. Reading A Certain Hunger reminded this reviewer of a line in the Stephanie Danler bestseller, Sweetbitter: “Appetite is not a symptom — it’s a state of being.” Summers takes this idea and runs awry with it. The result is an unapologetic, rollicking satire of one woman’s insatiable appetite. It won’t go down easy. Bon appetit!
