The horror novella I read this month, Consume by Kourtnea Hogan, absolutely blew me away. It was a five star read for me, and I sincerely hope you all check it out. I get into it more in-depth below, but it really pulls at the thread of adolescence, especially if you were an anxious kid who didn’t make friends easily.
June flew by, and the summer feels mostly over for me. This is obviously a silly thing to say, as it’s only just become proper summer, but still. I’m already planning for the fall semester and feeling preemptive dread. I love my job, but last year was really difficult and this year is looking to be more of the same.
But just because June flew by doesn’t mean there weren’t wonderful things that happened. It was actually packed! My husband and I took a long overdue trip to Chicago and promptly fell in love with the place. We’ve seen an ungodly amount of excellent live music lately. We’ve eaten a ton of mind-blowingly good food. And we celebrated our anniversary. Our power also went out for more that 24 hours during a horrible heatwave, but we’ve moved on from that.
I hope your summer is going well and you aren’t experiencing any Summertime Sadness. If you are, you’re welcome to participate in Goth Summer with me! We are wearing black linen, experimenting with makeup and accessories, reading Gothic novels, and listening to this playlist I made.
A heads up that this post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org.
Other Recommendations
Here is where I tell you about other things I’m enjoying!
Furiosa was actually so good and anyone who tells you differently is unwell. I know it’s nearing the end of its theater run, but I highly recommend you go see it on the big screen if you can. It was excellent, and exactly what I wanted from a Mad Max universe film.
Horror movie / indie makeup brand collabs are taking over. Glamlite recently had collections come out featuring the IPs of Child’s Play, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and probably more that I missed! I bought eyeshadow palettes from several of them (including the Ghost Face palette). Half Magic just released a cute collab with Maxxxine, so I hope this is a trend that continues.
I finally started the Indian Lake Trilogy and sobbed through the last 30 pages of My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fully sobbed. I can’t pick up Don’t Fear the Reaper just yet, so I’ll be lusting after that while I knock a few other titles off of my tbr.
Murder She Wrote is amazing…did you guys know that? Fucking rules. Can’t stop watching it.
My Libby app has been blessing me with the audiobooks of Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman, Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater, and September House by Carissa Orlando.
This is an installment of ‘Women Be Eating,’ a mini-series on books that explore the greater relationship between women and consumption in literature. This is a fledgling thought for me, so let’s see where it goes! There are spoilers ahead, so make sure you read the book first if you care about such things.
Consume by Kourtnea Hogan (2022)
A big thank you to horror author Hailey Piper for recommending this book to me years ago when I put out a call on social media for books about women eating things they shouldn’t. That was back when I was starting this newsletter and was building my list of ‘Women Be Eating’ titles, of which this is one.
Back then, all I knew about this book was that it was about a woman eating hair. It turned out to be so much more. TW for body dysmorphia, disordered eating, abusive relationships, parental death, hair, vomit, abandonment, gore. Spoilers ahead.
This was a five star read for me.
What’s the book about?
Thirteen-year-old Tegan’s mother passed away from cancer not long ago, and in his grief her father moved them to a new town to start over. But Tegan doesn’t have any friends in this new town, and she’s too painfully shy and anxious to make them. She can barely move around in the world without having a panic attack, and she hates the body she has to move in. She thinks it’s too fat, too dull, too lifeless.
Tegan has decided to “fix” that by vomiting regularly and heavily restricting her caloric intake. This quickly develops into advanced eating disorders. Like many people who experience these conditions, her dysmorphia does not dissipate. Instead, her purging becomes an emotional crutch that she leans on when overstimulated or disregulated, but it’s never a permanent solution.
She succeeds in losing a startling amount of weight, but the real change happens when she is taken in by Rileigh, a sparkling, bright, golden perfect girl in her class who starts to pay attention to her. They become best friends and are quickly inseparable.
This rockets Tegan to a level of popularity she never could have imagined. But it also causes Tegan to become fixated on Rileigh. She never wants to be separated from her. She wants to consume her. And to do that, Tegan begins secretly eating strands of Rileigh’s hair she finds around Riley’s house. This becomes another emotional crutch for Tegan.
Everything seems great for a while, until the betrayals (trying not to spoil too much). The betrayals lead to unsafe situations for Tegan, and more and more she craves Rileigh’s attention…and her hair. She soon develops trichophagia, and the hair inside her become a source of mental power for her:
Tegan fought the urge to scream. She squeezed her eyes shut and could see herself, exhaling all the hair inside her, grabbing [redacted to avoid spoiler], and holding him beneath the surface. The hair would slide back into her like a snake, hiding her power.” p. 49
The ending of this book is explosive and incredible. It’s a tragic coming of rage about a lonely, terrified young girl who just wants to be accepted for who she is but cannot conquer her own self-loathing.
My thoughts.
When I was in high school and didn’t know what anxiety was (despite suffering from it often), I would lay in bed and imagine myself as the Vitruvian Man but with black electricity exploding from my fingers and toes. That black electricity was the excess energy in my body that I felt like was causing me grief, and this visualization was my way of managing overstimulation. I’m fairly certain I have undiagnosed ADHD.
Because I get overwhelmed easily and have panic attacks and rage blackouts, I tend to really relate to coming of rage stories. That black electricity could have been aimed at people or things…why not? While I have not experienced all of the deeply sad things that happen to Tegan in this book, I have experiences some of them, and I have friends who have experienced others. It was a relatable book, and that surprised me.
Consume dives deeply into this kind of negative excess energy manifesting in a young teen girl. Tegan is so deeply unhappy. She was unable to cope with the passing of her mother, who, from her memories, seemed like a critical woman. That grief and pain radiated to other parts of her life.
I really loved Consume, and it’s hard for me to fully express why, but partly because it illustrates such truths about anxiety and grief and being 13. The intense pain you go through when you’re trying to figure out who you are and where your place is in the world. The intense pain you feel when you’re rejected. Just, the intense pain, I guess, of youth.
The themes of toxic relationships and abandonment are strong. Tegan has a toxic relationship with her body and her own consciousness. She has a toxic relationship with her peers, with her dead mother. And while her relationship with her father isn’t toxic, it’s not enough to save her. She manipulates herself into a version of herself that is agreeable and easy for others, but it threatens to kill her.
Tegan is so consumed with being accepted that she is fully terrified of her new friend abandoning her and leaving her to the debilitating loneliness she was trapped in before. But this friendship seems conditional and stressful for Tegan, even on a good day. In order to keep this friendship, Tegan concedes a lot, including her own safety.
Regardless, Tegan becomes dependent on Rileigh to the point where she wants to meld with Rileigh. She doesn’t feel like she can live without Rileigh. When she sees her friend slipping away from her, she feels her whole world collapsing. She can’t think about whether that world was worth saving or not, only that it will no longer exist. Again, this feels so relatable to adolescence.
Other than this novella being heartbreaking and perfect, it also features an asexual (ace) main character. That is something you don’t often see expressed in fiction, and it plays an important part of this story and Tegan’s identity.
Tegan’s ace identity is the one thing that she firmly stands by throughout the story, the one true thing about herself that she honors in a way that is self-affirming and grounding. The juxtaposition between that and her personal betrayals make the betrayals even more painful.
And then on top of all of this, the final scenes of the novella are some of the most fun body horror I’ve read in a while. It’s truly a Carrie moment, and it is glorious.
Sorry I wasn’t terribly eloquent here or offer any mind-blowing insights. I just really loved Consume, found it full of painful truths, and really want more from Kourtnea Hogan. Please read this novella!
What’s Next?
I’m still planning another post in July, since this one was technically for June. I’m aiming to read The Bell Chime by Mona Kabbani, but my mood may take me elsewhere. I try to cut myself some slack here.