Library Manager
Manage your library—your way. Keep a running list or organize archived books into little stacks. i.e. Beach Reads, Cozy Covers, True Crime, etc.
Starved No More: Feminine Appetite in Horror Fiction
Forget comfort and gratitude—these haunting reads explore what happens when women finally feed the hunger the world told them to hide.
Here in the US, November is typically associated with Thanksgiving, a day where the focus is on an abundance of food. It’s a meal of excess, where the expectation is to eat more than your fill with plenty left over for later.
It’s an interesting experience for many women. Though we’re told that it’s okay for us to indulge our appetites, to accept our bodies as they are and feed them, we’re still given conflicting messages about what is beautiful and feminine and acceptable.
Even if we’re thin enough, we shouldn’t be too ambitious, too needy, too angry, too much. All of this leads many women to stuff down their wants, their desires, their hunger for more. But when they say enough? When they decide they are tired of wanting and decide to fill the emptiness all that want has left? Well, all I can say it, bon appétit. Here are six exquisitely delicious horror novels featuring feminine hunger that are guaranteed to satiate.
As climate change affects us more and more, I think it’s natural to wonder what we might eat if our food supply dwindled. In a dystopian future, it might be people. Marcos works at a factory harvesting people, though, it’s been rebranded as “special meat”. When he’s given a live specimen, a woman named Jasmine, he can’t help but see her as more than meat. Only, his wife has a different kind of hunger. The kind of ache food won’t fill. And perhaps it’s only Jasmine who can give her what she truly wants.
Being a teenage girl is horrifying enough without your mom bringing a creepy man into your house. Ji-won’s life has been in disarray ever since her father left the family for another woman. But her mother’s new boyfriend is a loud-mouthed white man with a wandering succulent blue eye. Those eyes follow her through the apartment, into her dreams, sparking a peculiar hunger that Ji-won can’t quite sate.
You have to have discerning taste to be a food critic. Along with an appetite. Dorothy Daniels has both. As ravenous for sex as she is food, she also hungers for something else. Something that she’s tired of suppressing. A hunger that makes her uniquely herself. The food world might belong to men, but Dorothy isn’t about to let a silly thing like that stand in her way.
After a virus infects the world, evolution is the only way to survive. Some crave brains, others drink blood. There are those who harvest and one lucky woman whose growths will birth the new world. It’s a Lovecraftian fever dream where carnal desire is one with an appetite for the flesh. You’ll be riveted and horrified in equal measure, and I promise, you will never look at calamari or octopi the same again.
It’s normal to develop your tastes from your parents. After all, they choose what to feed us from the time we’re in utero until we are old enough to choose for ourselves. Margot never questioned why her mother fed her “strays”. Why she lures them in, plies them with wine, and eats their bones clean. But when mama decides to keep one alive, everything changes. Hungry for love, Margot has to face the terrifying choice between mama’s unrelenting appetite and her own freedom.
When vultures start circling her home, Andi can’t help but think they’re sending her an invitation: come discover the sickly-sweet banquet of decay. She moves from fascination to obsession. She needs to know what the birds know. She needs to know what carrion tastes like. It’s a desire that moves past eating dead flesh. Andi yearns to be one with the flock. But the secrets the vultures keep comes with a price. One that risks turning the people she loves into nothing more than flesh to be devoured.
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