It-girl Literary Heroines Are All Cannibals Now

What has happened to the literary woman? She used to slouch listlessly towards Bethlehem. Now she is eating people. Chelsea G. Summers’ 2020 novel A Certain Hunger follows a food writer who is in prison for murdering, cooking and eating several sex partners. In Ainslie Hogarth’s 2022 novel Motherthing, a woman deals with the Freudian fallout of her mother-in-law’s death by cooking a personal enemy. In Monika Kim’s 2024 thriller The Eyes Are the Best Part, a Korean-American protagonist gets her own back on white men who fetishise Asian women, by stockpiling and eating their eyeballs. This year’s Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito reads like a gory take on Agnes Grey and has its central governess joke about eating the children under her care.