I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season! Thanksgiving has always been a time full of joy and laughter for me, when I can enjoy a beautiful meal with beautiful loved ones. I hope you were able to do the same this year! I hope you were able to do the same this year! Unfortunately, all of my fun holiday activity actually got me sick. Not COVID sick, but sick enough that I spent the remainder of my vacation recovering and not working on this newsletter. This is why it’s late…my deepest apologies.
I had grand plans of giving you a short annotated list of weird books that would make great gifts, but I just didn’t have the brain capacity to follow through. Instead, here are a handful of weirdish books (no annotations) that I personally think would be great Secret Santa or Swiss Army Knife gifts if needed.
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston (middle grade, first in a series)
Secret Santa by Andrew Shaffer
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton
Sourdough by Robin Sloan
Please make sure you click on those books and read the descriptions…the titles alone do not do them justice.
I hope you’re feeling a bit of that holiday glow still, because we’re about to get BLEAK. Content warnings ahead for mental illness, self-harm, intimate partner abuse, murder, animal abuse, and gore. Loved this one.
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.
To Be Devoured by Sara Tantlinger
We’re back with ‘Women Be Eating’! A warning before you read on…this month’s book is squarely situated in the horror genre. I hope you’ve fully digested your Thanksgiving meals, because this one is gory. Not cute gory, like A Certain Hunger was. It’s disgusting. And that’s the point! If you can’t do body horror, maybe don’t read this month’s newsletter entry.
Sara Tantlinger is an award-winning horror author who lives in my general region, and I have been lucky enough to meet her and invite her to my job (academic campus) to do a reading of her work. She is primarily a poet, which I suspect is why her novella To Be Devoured got to me so much. It’s not just her choice of words (which are musical), but also the context and juxtaposition she creates.
Stick with me through this one, folks. It will likely be the grossest entry in my ‘Women Be Eating’ series. Spoilers for plot ahead.
What’s the book about?
Andi has a new therapist, Dr. Fawning, and she’s really good at listening. She listens to Andi talk about the tragic and confusing death of her toddler brother when they were both kids, and then the violent and also confusing murder-suicide that took her father and mother from her not long after. Dr. Fawning also listens to her talk about her beautiful, amazing girlfriend, Luna, and how having her in Andi’s life has been a blessing. But Dr. Fawning does caution Andi that maybe she’s becoming a bit obsessed.
Obsessed with Luna? No, Andi loves Luna! But obsessed with turkey vultures and the taste of carrion? Now that’s different. Andi cannot get the question of what carrion tastes like out of her head. This fascination soon spirals into a deep desire to be transformed into a turkey vulture and be accepted by them as one of their own.
This obsession with consumption starts to broaden. It starts to land on Luna. Andi is clearly unwell, but when she decides to taste Luna’s period blood during sex without consent, she alienates the one person she’s always had on her side. Luna views this act as a violation, as almost threatening, and she leaves Andi. This results in Andi escalating her behavior, which brings me to the most upsetting part of the book (for me, anyway).
Andi decides to abscond with one of her neighbors new piglets. She just needs to know. She needs the turkey vultures to accept her. She steals the piglet, runs into the woods, and eats it whole. All of it. The reason this was so upsetting to me was not the depictions of gore, but rather the depictions of the soft, adorable, cute AF piglet pre-consumption. The way Sara described this baby reminded me of my cat, who is also small and warm and soft and wiggly. It was the beautiful and adorable depictions of the piglet that upset me so much, not the descriptions of Andi eating it alive with her bare hands.
Please allow me a bit of a tangent here, because this comparison to my cat made me think of the excellent novel Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer, which has a lengthy yet interesting scene depicting a disgusting and cruel game hosted by noblemen and the moneyed classes in 18th century England. In the book, as part of an underground gambling ring, they would pay destitute men to consume an entire live cat (all of it) using just their hands and teeth as tools.
There are reports of people attempting this act in the 18th century, but I’m unsure if it ever occurred as they described it in Mary Toft. Not only is this disturbing and disgusting, but eating a live cat (you were not allowed to knock it out or wring it’s neck before consumption) would certainly get you absolutely shredded. Cats will wreck you. And of course, all the rich fucks would revel in the bloody disgusting mess, as both man and cat got eviscerated. Anyway, read Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen. It’s extremely weird and based on true events. I loved it.
After the eating of the piglet in To Be Devoured, Andi’s behavior escalates until humans start becoming her victims, and the novella culminates in a truly disgusting situation where Andi is literally shoving rotting maggoty carrion down her throat while being surrounded by police, both to finally bridge that gap between herself and the turkey vultures, and to hopefully asphyxiate herself to death. Suicide by rotting meat. The descriptions in this scene were quite something to behold. Yowza (Great job, Sara!). And that therapist of hers? Don’t worry, Dr. Fawning is right by her side through to the bitter end.
Suicide by rotting meat.
My thoughts.
I enjoy body horror, and I enjoyed To Be Devoured, but I had a much stronger physical reaction to this than I expected. I read lots of different kinds of horror, and I’m not normally too affected, but this one made my stomach turn. I know this was Sara’s goal, so congrats to her! I will always read Sara’s work, because she’s great at what she does.
To Be Devoured is told in first person through Andi’s narration, and we’re dealing with a very unhinged and unreliable narrator. It’s very clear from the beginning that Andi is mentally ill and suffering from extreme PTSD. She has never been able to take control of herself after the deaths of her family members, and she frequently talks about how wrath is one of her defining characteristics.
As a rageful person myself, I had to look up the difference between wrath and rage. What makes one acceptable, and what makes the other a cardinal sin? The immediate answer is that wrath is uncontrollable rage with the desire and intent to seek vengeance. Rage alone is not evil. Wrath alone is napalm. Andi has never has control of her wrath, and during the sequence of her mental breakdown, she executes her wrath on the innocents around her.
Andi’s desire to consume is not necessarily about power or sexual desire in the same way it was in A Certain Hunger (although I did almost named this issue ‘From Lover to Lunch, Too?’ because of her treatment of Luna). That being said, there is a sexual component to some of Andi’s consumption, and she certainly is engaging in that behavior as a way to regain power. Sara actually comments on this common association through Andi:
The only thing Dr. Fawning did say earlier was some bullshit metaphor about raw meat representing a desire for sex and blah blah blah, heard it all before. (p. 50)
Andi is obsessed with death and decay. The turkey vultures are representations of this freer, more pure state of being. Purity is something Andi associates with raw flesh, carrion, and the vultures. She becomes fixated on eating raw meat, because cooking it would render it too safe. And it needs to be rotting, so she can know what the turkey vultures know. They are gods to Andi.
As you read, it becomes clear that Andi’s compulsion to consume is wrapped up in her grief and her desire to be free from her mental illness. I think perhaps the best way to illustrate Andi’s growing obsession with carrion and the birds is with this quote:
What does it taste like — dead flesh? Do the bodies haunt the vultures after they consume the carcass? If I eat a human’s meat, do they live on inside me forever? Humans eat cooked ham, steak, venison, and more all the time. All those dead cows, chickens, pigs, fish — they become meals. Their bodies digesting inside another body. Bones and organs, blood and marrow, absorbing and taking what each part needs to survive. (p. 41)
And then, on the next page…
What if I had saved part of her [Andi’s mother] skin or brain or liquids before she was buried? Maybe she’d be living inside me, a small part of her, whispering and guiding me through this life. (p. 42)
It appears that she considers the consumption as a form of preservation. Andi also describes a mental image she leans on from time to time, of a graveyard with representative stones for people and things she’s lost. This is how she keeps track of her loss, a way to carry the memory of what she’s lost with her at all times. Perhaps, to her, the concept of consuming the flesh of the people she loves is a way to do the same…keep a living record of them with her at all times. These two images, the stones and the vultures, merge in Andi’s mind.
The birds are there, nestled inside my mind’s tombstone labyrinth… (p. 40)
There are multiple cultures out there that include ritualistic consumption of a corpse as a part of funeral rites. I remember reading in one of Caitlin Doughty’s books about a tribe that consumes the rotting corpses of their dead loved ones in their entirety, and usually end up puking a lot and getting sick. But they still do it! Because that is how they honor and remember their dead.
Our deaths deserve no other meaning than to be devoured…I join the vultures in their wake, magnificent figures circling a dead beast as if in ritual for what is to take place. (p. 48 & 49)
What I find interesting when comparing Andi to Dorothy, both are trapped by their life circumstances, and both use cannibalism as an outlet or a way to escape entrapment. Dorothy gains power and control as a marginalized woman. Andi is trapped by her mental illness and grief, and by a society that was not there to care for her. She is compelled to eat carrion and human flesh as a way to transcend her grief and her own physical flesh.
I’m sure I’m botching the hell out of this analysis (not a scholar), but I’m excited to see how To Be Devoured fits in with the other books on my ‘Women Be Eating’ reading list. I hope this one didn’t gross you out too badly. My next book is slightly more palatable, but still about eating bodies…BONES AND ALL (lol).
Additional Recommendations
Of course I need to recommend the rest of Sara’s work to you, which is primarily poetry. Her collection The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes won the Stoker award for Best Poetry Collection in 2018!
I also recommend Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer, as mentioned above. It’s less graphic, has a bit of humor injected in it, but is still extraordinarily strange and morbid.
Musically speaking, if you enjoyed To Be Devoured, I think I would recommend the work of the experimental punk band Suicide. They’re both dreamy and abrasive. Some songs you may love, and some may make you want to puke! Enjoy!
Next Month
We’re back with another ‘Women Be Eating’ entry in December! I’ll be featuring the recently adapted Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis. While the book Bones & All is YA and much less gruesome than To Be Devoured, I think they will be interesting titles to compare. I also fully plan to go see the film this weekend, so I’ll be able to talk about the adaptation as well. This is your warning! If you don’t want to be spoiled, pick up a copy of Bones & All and go see the movie starring the beautiful Timothée Chalamet at the height of scumbag aesthetic. Chef’s kiss.