A CERTAIN HUNGER

Think Eat, Pray, Love if the narrator were a wildly articulate and charming cannibal.

“Why, I wonder now, did I kill him?” ponders Dorothy Daniels from her prison cell. Imprisoned for life (plus 20 years), she fondly recounts a decade of killing her lovers, starting with the last unsuspecting victim, whose grisly demise begins with a delicious duck confit and abruptly ends with an ice pick to the neck. “Maybe he was my middle-aged madness, my little red Corvette, my last great gasp before I headed off into menopause.” Summers’ narrator is far from your stereotypical psychotic serial killer. She’s a 51-year-old bestselling author, revered food writer, and James Beard Award winner. Her work has been published in glossy magazine spreads “as slick as oiled thighs,” but those days have come and gone, and her “inevitable slow ebb into obscurity” with the rest of print media is looming. Instead of quietly succumbing to her fate, she discovers a new interest: “Giovanni. I killed him and ate his liver.” Like a lecherous M.F.K. Fisher sprinkled with the beguiling depravity of Hannibal Lecter, Dorothy travels the world, eating its food and its men, relishing every bite along the way—including a rump roast made out of...you know. Part culinary travelogue, part campy horror, Summers’ debut is nothing if not wholly original. Though at times it can become a little tiresome reading from the point of view of a full-blown sociopath, the book offers a perspective hardly explored: that of a woman who's not just angry, but violent. In a literary canon rife with novels glorifying sadistic men, that alone is worth applauding. Unabashedly and full-heartedly living out her id, Dorothy balances her most revolting qualities with a caustic wit, a kind of wink and a nod to readers when things get ghastly that it’s all in good fun. After all, she argues, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Move aside, Bret Easton Ellis.