A Certain Hunger

What Readers Say

The most common reaction I see to A Certain Hunger is gleeful disbelief — "I can't believe this is a first novel" keeps coming up, usually followed by something about how Dorothy is both appalling and completely irresistible. Readers consistently reach for the Hannibal Lecter comparison, but what they're really getting at is that Dorothy has the same impeccable taste and total contempt for ordinary people, just filtered through a female food critic's voice and a very sharp sense of humor. People describe it as dark, funny, gory, and a little nauseating, sometimes in the same sentence, always as a compliment.

The feminist thread runs through nearly every mention. One reader pulled out the line — "Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest" — as a kind of thesis statement for why the book works. Readers in "weird girl" and "female rage" spaces are the ones recommending it most enthusiastically, and they're often surprised it isn't better known. The note that comes up again and again is that the book delivers exactly what it promises and then some: it's the female serial killer book people didn't know they were waiting for.

Who It's For

This is for readers who finished Gone Girl and wanted Amy Dunne to go further — much further. If you've read Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and loved how wrong it felt to root for the protagonist, Dorothy will give you the same experience but with better wine and more elaborate meals. Readers pair it with Come Closer by Sara Gran, which shares the unsettling quality of a woman narrating her own unraveling with total composure.

It also turns up in "girly-pop horror" conversations alongside Earthlings and Nightbitch — books where the horror isn't supernatural but something colder and more social. If you need your protagonist to be sympathetic or redeemable, look elsewhere. Dorothy is not interested in your forgiveness.

Reading Context

A Certain Hunger is a standalone novel. It's written as a kind of confessional memoir from Dorothy herself, which gives it a very specific voice — arch, self-aware, and openly unreliable. The satire of food criticism and lifestyle journalism is sharp enough to work even if you don't follow that world, but readers with any familiarity with that culture seem to find it especially satisfying.

I'm not aware of a film or TV adaptation. The book shows up most often in lists organized around female rage, dark comedy, and literary horror — it sits at the intersection of all three without feeling like a genre exercise. It's short enough to read in a sitting or two, which is probably part of why readers describe finishing it in one day.