A Certain Hunger

DEBUT Presented as a prison memoir, this tale is narrated by the funny and astute Dorothy Daniels, a food critic who just happens to be an unrepentant cannibalistic serial killer. (Please don’t call her a mass murderer, as “mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger’s.”) A slave to her appetites, Dorothy recalls Hannibal Lecter in her sophistication and refinement. A sensual being, she is descriptive and exacting in her depictions of both sex and food. Ever clear-eyed, she sees the large-scale butcher operation of her Italian boyfriend for what it is, “a carefully planned organization bent on the extermination of animals for our gastronomical pleasure”; understanding that others choose to look away, she obfuscates the uncomfortable truths into an award-winning magazine profile (before killing and eating him). The psychopathic, darkly feminist antihero can be viewed as a big middle finger to the common practice of judging a female protagonist on her “likability” or “relatability.”