Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta – Book Review
The novel is unsettling, sexy, and poignant. The atmosphere of Cadenze is wonderfully rendered. It’s a small town that has a strange almost pride in its not-quite-backwards belief, where generational legacies relationships that loom over every interaction in a way that is shown to be both suffocating and strangely comforting for the characters.
Feast While You Can is a unique novel and difficult to classify. It could be a folk horror story within a lesbian, enemies-to-lovers type romance or it could be a lesbian enemies-to-lovers romance within a folk horror. The tense romance and the folk horror are inseparable in this novel due to the small-town setting of Cadenze and the way this setting inflects every element of the novel.
Set in a remote mountain town called Cadenze in what is reminiscent of Italy (no specific country is ever stated), the novel follows a young woman named Angelina and the ancient evil that has been lying dormant in Cadenze’s caves that attaches itself to her. The only thing that seems to repel the evil entity is being close to Jagvi, her brother’s lesbian ex-girlfriend. However, Jagvi is the one person Angelina shouldn’t get close to – an outsider in the small town and breaker of her brother’s heart. So, you can see how their relationship and the horror are intimately connected.
The novel is unsettling, sexy, and poignant.
The atmosphere of Cadenze is wonderfully rendered. It’s a small town that has a strange almost pride in its not-quite-backwards belief, where generational legacies relationships that loom over every interaction in a way that is shown to be both suffocating and strangely comforting for the characters. Clements and Datta really capture this tension inherent in small town life. What was particularly fantastic is the way they show how sexual and racial politics collide with other social privileges and unspoken pockets of generational power to create a messy social dynamic that deepens the central conflict and horror.
The horror doesn’t come from scenes of gore (aside from one climactic scene towards the end of the novel) but from a dark psychological uncertainty. Even in the aforementioned gore-fest scene at the end the bloodshed is mingled with the pervasive sense of Eldritch horror that permeates the novel. The thing that lurks in the cave, that occupies shadows and feasts on its victims futures was haunting and a brilliant allegory for the potential pitfalls of insular small-town life.
Its attachment to our main character Angelina was terrifying and brilliant. The way it worms into her life in unexpected ways and the reality-bending ways it wreaked havoc were fantastically rendered in Clements and Datta’s prose. The only thing to critique is that the pacing of the end of the novel felt slightly rushed. It did really capture the chaos of the characters at that point in the story, but perhaps a little too well.
Overall though, a really fantastic book for those looking for an unsettling yet sexy read.
Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
‘A truly monstrous romance’. – JULIA ARMFIELD, AUTHOR OF OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA
‘An exciting new hybrid horror-romance novel’. – THE NEW YORK TIMES
‘Lesbian pulp meets literary horror’. – YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN, AUTHOR OF THE SAFEKEEP
‘A heady novel of desire and despair’. – – SFX Magazine
A monstrous-yet-sexy queer horror novel guaranteed to keep you up all night…
There is a monster inside of Angelina Sicco. All she wants is to walk her mongrel dog, hold court with her brother in their local dive bar, and bait hot queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown, Cadenze. The problem is, so does the monster. It wants what Angelina has done, it wants what she’s going to do. It wants to eat her whole life, and every version of every future she might have with it.
Until it possessed her, the famous monster of Cadenze lived deep in a pit inside the mountain. On the night, Angelina runs into her brother’s ex, the sternly handsome Jagvi. The creature rises hungry. It is ready to eat. Its claws comb through her private thoughts, her most intimate and traumatic memories. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it. The monster feasts on all the mess that makes up a life. Angelina Sicco’s has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And just how much will it cost her?
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