The most recent serial killer book I read was A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers. The book is absolutely brilliant. 10/10, lovely writing, witty, thoughtful, sarcastic voice and just dark enough to keep my internal “horror” reader engaged. It features a middle-aged female serial killer, Dorothy, writing her tell-all memoir from the confines of a prison she has no hope of leaving. According to interviews with the author, it was written with two books in mind: Eat, Pray, Love and American Psycho. Honestly, it falls perfectly in the middle of those two — balancing the “remaking” of a life through travel, food, and intimate relationships while exposing capitalism and consumerism at its worst. Towards the beginning of the book there is a quote that seems to sum up the story:
Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.
The book was, honestly, just what I was looking for when I started this journey — something written in first person, from the serial killer’s perspective, that stood up to the big names in the genre and didn’t excuse the killer for their actions by giving them a “valid reason” for their murders. In fact, this book was MORE than I hoped for because it didn’t simply place a woman in a traditionally male role — instead it fully adapted that role to the female experience, making the book stand out as a feminist critique.
While I definitely want to gush on about this book — one that dares center a sexually active, desire-filled, homicidal woman in her late fifties — I also want to take this conversation out to the broader topic of the enmeshment of serial killers and cannibalism. This is the fourth book I’ve read for this series that features some sort of cannibalism, and I know many more do. (The books I’m talking about are: Child 44, Bones and All, Butcher and Blackbird, A Certain Hunger. Obviously the most famous is Lector in Silence of the Lambs, but *gasp* I haven’t read it yet). There’s something that goes hand-in-hand with cannibalism and serial killing. Perhaps because a person must be dead to be eaten (except, that isn’t always true, is it?) or maybe because cannibalism is seen as the ultimate taboo, even more outlandish than murder.
The Moral Perspective on Human Consumption
The Taboo of Human Flesh
When we get into serial killers that are also cannibals, I doubt I’d find a story that is not a critique of human consumption which usually blossoms out from the most basic, literal form of consumption — eating. Towards the beginning of A Certain Hunger, Dorothy addresses the arbitrary cultural rules that make cannibalism a taboo — pointing out that every culture has different forms of meat that people are allowed to consume or not and that in some cultures, even cannibalism is respected. This serves to set Dorothy as a classic serial killer: one outside of social rules who rejects culture as a controlling force. Dorothy seems born outside of society — a sociopath from day 1 — with only curiosity and amusement regarding human food rules. In this situation the cannibalism is used to set the killer outside of our social structure and put them on a completely separate perspective with different rules and expectations from life.
While this is one of the common origin stories of the cannibal serial killer (seen again in Butcher and Blackbird as well as Silence of the Lambs) it is far from the only approach to the cannibal serial killer.
The Critique of Meat
Perhaps the second most common cannibal serial killer trope is that used not as a rejection of social norms, but to shed a light on how arbitrary those norms are. According to the forward, Bones and All was written when the author became a vegan, and the story was meant to support veganism — perhaps by making humans into an “animal” that the main character needed to consume. While I loved Bones and All as a story, I didn’t take away as strong of a moral critique as I think I was supposed to get from it mostly because the main character had no choice in their consumption of humans… they simply could not exist without eating humans whereas humans can 100% thrive as vegans. Alternatively, A Certain Hunger and Child 44 both provided strong reflections of the eating habits of humans… perhaps by keeping the main character fully and completely human. While Bones and All perhaps offered stronger perspective taking of the consumer and the food, it lost the visceral horror of humans doing horrible things in connection to food — which is in the choice.
The Critique of Society: Choice Burdened By History
I read Child 44 years ago, and from what I remember, the majority of the book focuses on Leo’s investigation as a detective in a society where serial murder is “not allowed to exist”, and how that denial of the possibility of serial murder allows it to happen for years. Very little of the book focuses on the killer or the victims. But I do remember the book opened with scenes of the Holodomor. Two brothers trying to survive in a time with no food, their father gone, their mother desperate, are given the hope of a meal. While hunting a cat (a taboo in itself that has been crossed and accepted due to the famine), the boys are hunted. The older brother is kidnapped and taken for food, and the mother blames the younger son. The young brother, having lived through the famine, lost his father, had his brother taken as food, and routinely blamed by his mother, grows up into a cannibal. The story is bookended with this theme of humans as food — the first in a moment of desperation and the final scenes with the now grown man in a world where there famine has passed and he could choose a different life, but he continues to re-enact the violence of his childhood. I won’t say the book is meant to inspire sympathy for the killer. After all, it is based on one of the most horrific modern serial killers. But it does provide a moral framework for the cannibalism in the book: not so much of an excuse as a logical reason that makes sense to the average, empathetic heart. The killer is stuck repeating his past — regressed to a moment of fear and horror where he was helpless. Child 44 shows how the breakdown of society can lead to the breakdown and rebuilding of morality — a child raised in famine learns to eat humans and keeps that “morality” for his whole life. This sets up a way to critique the way society builds morality and especially the dangers of a Government that requires its citizens to deny the horrors that are happening around them. In this manner, we can almost (but not quite) understand the moral compass of the killer, and though he must be rooted out of society, we see his hunger as a creation of society.
The Critique of Culture: Full Awareness and Choice
A Certain Hunger approaches cannibalism in a completely different way: while the main character had a complicated relationship with her mother, and her mother instilled her with a love for quality food — Dorothy’s cannibalism is not the result of social malfunction but a rejection of a seemingly working social structure. Her relationship to sex and femininity is tied to food, and as the book progresses, her eating her lovers becomes a rejection of all the ways the feminine is expected to care for men and be soft. Instead of nurturing, Dorothy chooses to be nurtured, by the very bodies of her lovers. Yes, she is a sociopath. But her consumption is also a “fuck you” to every time a man expected something from her *(usually sex). Yet her consumption does not feel cruel or malicious. It seems like an almost natural progression from sex to cannibalism, shown by Dorothy quoting Georges Bataille with, “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” Although Dorothy has experienced all of the hardships of the modern female, her cannibalism is not fueled by anger but, in a way, love — her primary love being food.
Levels of Choice in Cannibalism
The origin of cannibalism in these three books deals with the three perspectives of the serial killer:
- The killer who cannot stop. In its purest form, this is a book that deals with paranormal forces. The demons. The vampires. The ones who are cursed to kill. Those who are controlled by evil beings. But it can also include mental health perspectives — those killers who have a compulsion to kill and then, often in the form of a dual personality, spend the cool-off period in a state of regret and self-loathing. In a way, these are the most relatable serial killers because they are at least aware of and attached to our morality at times.
- The socially-constructed killer. This is the killer who cannot escape his past. It is the killer who belonged to a family of cannibals. The child who saw something horrible and brutal. The victim of ongoing abuse. These killers could probably stop, but it would take a lot of therapy and, if they stop to critically face their actions, they will probably become more like the first killer — running from their guilt while killing by compulsion. However, they likely do not feel guilt in that they are trapped in a repeating moment that they act out almost unaware of what they are doing. Because they are human, they do have some choice in their actions, but history has thrown “fate” into the mix, which guides them. (Though not quite a serial killer story, I’m reminded of Resilience by Christi Nogle, one of my favorite “trying to cover the trauma of the past but it bleeds through” stories.)
- The killer who does not want to stop. This killer sees nothing wrong with their actions. They choose to kill and eat because they can, and because they enjoy it. This, though perhaps the most human because the actions are rooted solidly in choice, are perhaps the hardest to relate to, because they simply reject our social rules and expectations.
Late Stage Capitalism and Gratuitous Consumption
Of course, this book is not a simple treatise on food — it’s a look at late stage capitalism including how divorced from the reality of food production most modern humans are and how much food has to do with social standing rather than nourishment. Dorothy is a food critic. She visits the most fancy restaurants, hiding her identity, but bankrolled by her publishers. During the peak of the story, Dorothy is hunting truffles in Italy on a trip paid for by her glossy magazines. Her palette — her understanding of food, shapes the trends of society. Perhaps ironically, she enjoys the more taboo parts of animals — the guts and brains and other organs, which are not overly popular in common-man modern America, and yet it is her taste that drives the popularity of the top New York restaurants. She prefers simplicity and good flavor and yet is extremely picky about the quality of her food. Perhaps a statement upholding the ideals of slow food and intentional eating while at the same time commenting on the ridiculousness of fashion-food and status.
It is as Dorothy descends into a powerless state, her position taken from her by the unstoppable wave of the internet and food bloggers, that she goes to the extreme of cannibalism. While these two things aren’t blatantly connected throughout the book, the timing of her murders — happening each time her power is threatened, does seem to speak to a time when the voices of the experts were valued being taken over by the voice of the masses, and the “expert” trying to hold onto some semblance of the older, slower ways. Although she doesn’t seem to care about the choices of others, she wants to live in a world where she can get the quality of ingredients and experiences that her palette demands. When she cannot, she will resort to eating humans — the final free-range meat available. But perhaps I’m just reading too much into it. It’s also worth noting that Dorothy, while loving high-dining experiences, also has a love for good french fries and other simple pleasures… all food consumption is a form of rebellion for her.
One thing I do know is that one of the main influences of this book was American Psycho. I’ve specifically avoided American Psycho because I was told the writing is intentionally tedious. That it gets into such long, deep descriptions of extravagance that it is at times boring. That being said, I feel like perhaps the long passages in A Certain Hunger were similarly crafted — going so deep into the depths of extravagance that it ends up feeling a bit over-the-top and satirical. But I loved the scenes of food description. The history of truffle hunting. The pages about meat production. It was fascinating. Perhaps because it was fascinating to Dorothy — her love and passion was food. Her moral structure was food production. In leaning into that we see a very structured, passionate person that we don’t see when she has sex, seduces men, or even maintains her few friendships. So, if the tedium of American Psycho is similarly structured, I feel like I might actually like it.
I actually finished this book a month ago, and I’ve been stuck with limited time to write up my thoughts. There are definitely more important themes in the book: the passion of the older woman. The importance of female friendship. Love as consumption. They were all daftly folded into a highly entertaining, unapologetic book that felt like a guilty pleasure to read.
Perhaps I’ll address these themes in another post, but for now I’ll get back to reading Shoot Me In the Face On a Beautiful Day which is OMG so good.
