Do you ever know that you’re going to enjoy a book so much that you just keep putting off reading it? That was me with Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta. I’m a big fan of the married co-authors’s previous work, the celebrity romance The View Was Exhausting, and the promise of their second book being a folk horror novel infused with lesbian romance felt almost too good to be true. Consequently, I was so excited to read it that I had to cart my copy around for a few months until I felt like the stars had aligned and it was the right time to read it.
Once I got past my personal reading quirks, I found that Feast While You Can absolutely lived up to my expectations. It’s a heady, immersive, and utterly unique blend of horror and romance that I absolutely inhaled. The novel weaves together supernatural threats and sexual tension into an addictive concoction that enveloped me as swiftly and completely as the demonic possession the protagonist finds herself fighting. But it’s more than just a compulsively readable, thrilling horror novel–there’s real depth to the characters and the world, from the grit and gossip of small-town Italy to the hurts and hopes of the characters.
Angelina Sicco, born and raised in the small Italian mountain town of Cadenze like generations of her family before her, spends her summers seducing tourists and trying to liven up a town known mostly for its ugly architecture and old stories about something ominous lurking in the caves. But when her brother’s ex-girlfriend, handsome Jagvi, returns to town and crashes a family party, Angelina finds an ancient evil that’s long lain dormant stirring to life. Targeted by a monstrous force she thought existed only in folk tales, Angelina soon realizes that Jagvi’s touch is the only thing that can repel its power, pushing the two women who’ve been circling each other for years into a passionate and forbidden romance. But this monster doesn’t feed on flesh–it wants Angelina’s passion and fear, her hopes and plans for the future, and she’s only growing tastier by the minute.
Splicing together genres–especially ones as disparate as horror and romance–can be hard to pull off, but Feast While You Can does it with aplomb. Rather than feeling like two different elements cobbled together, Clements and Datta perform some alchemical miracle to splice genres together into a sensual, lush, and terrifying tale.
While it’s not overtly a social horror novel, there’s also an interesting interpretation of the monster from the cave pit as being an allegory for what it means to grow up as queer and brown in a small town. Angelina and Jagvi are both biracial lesbians–Jagvi the daughter of an Indian mother and an Italian father, Angelina the daughter of mother from a sprawling local clan and a mysteriously vanished father who left her nothing besides her looks–but have lived vastly different experiences. Jagvi left Cadenze as soon as possible for the big city, seeking community and love elsewhere, while Angelina has stubbornly stayed in her hometown, determined to make it a place that welcomes someone like her. A monster that feeds on possibilities and futures, sucking away the dreams and hopes, is a fascinating choice for two such characters who have spent their lives grappling with the fact that their visions for happiness are different than most around them–terrifying, but also full of endless possibilities.
The romance in Feast While You Can is delicious, pulpy, and heated. Jagvi and Angelina have a long history–not merely from growing up in the same small town, but from Jagvi’s childhood romance with Angelina’s older brother, its tumultuous end and tenuous reforming into another kind of love, and the fact that Jagvi was definitely, absolutely, certainly not Angelina’s gay awakening as a teenager. Each touch between the two of them carries the weight of history and consequences, its power almost literalized by the way that Jagvi’s presence can repel the monster that has set its sights on Angelina.
The world of Feast While You Can also feels incredibly well-realized for such a narrow setting. From the mountain trails and Roman ruins that surround Cadenze to the crowded bars and family parties, the novel is imbued with a real sense of history and place. While the supernatural elements remain vague throughout, I found that was actually a strength of the horror elements. There’s a million variations on the folk tales about the creature from the cave, meaning no one is exactly sure where it came from, why it hungers, or where it will next strike. The fear comes from not knowing, the creature whose history and true nature is just as hidden in shadows as the cave pit it dwells in.
Feast While You Can is thrilling as both a horror novel and a romance, twining together fear and desire into a new kind of literary beast, one that gripped me from start to finish.
Content warnings: animal attack, pet death, depictions of homophobia and racism
Leave a Reply