Feral Eldritch Ballerinas: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

Laure is a ballet dancer who has devoted herself entirely to her profession. She spends every waking moment honing her skill. And she is perfect. But as she soon learns, perfect is not enough. It doesn’t matter that she’s the best, because she’s fighting to rise up in an institution that sees her working class background and Blackness as incompatible with their art, and she’s powerless to change that. Well, until a river of blood helps even the playing field.

This is about a teen girl who descends into the catacombs below Paris to make a deal with a river of blood to get power: the power to be recognized for her skill, but also the power to influence others. She’s introduced to this eldritch god, Acheron, by a ballerina who did the same thing and is reaping the rewards. Making this deal connects Laure with a different world and the dangerous people who made deals to get there, and she is torn between not feeling like she fully belongs there or in the world of ballet.

I loved this villain origin story. Laure is angry and is aware of her worth: two attributes female characters are usually punished for. She wants power, and she is unapologetic and fairly unconflicted about this. She considers how she wants to use this power, and where she may have gone too far, but she relishes having it. After constantly being at the mercy of this institution, having control over people is refreshing.

This is a bloody book about a girl becoming a monster… or a god. Or both. I thought the author expertly pulled off making Laura a character I still felt sympathy for and was rooting for even as she did monstrous things. (It’s definitely a “good for her” story.) I realize I haven’t really talked about the plot, but it was Laura as a character that I was really invested in. There are murders, and a bit of a mystery, and an M/F romance subplot, but I was mostly here for the vibes and for Laure’s journey into becoming herself.

As for the queer content, Laura mentions her ex-girlfriend, and there is a brief scene with the two of them. There is more of an M/F romance, but that’s also not the main focus of the book.

This is book one of a duology, and I’m really looking forward to book two. You could read this as a standalone, because it does wrap up the storyline satisfactorily, but I want to see where Laura ends up next after that intense conclusion of the first book.

If you’re a fan of angry, feral girls and women, revenge stories, and plots about Faustian bargains, you have to pick this one up. It’s such a perfect October read. Oh, and as for the post title? That’s the author’s description: “my feral eldritch ballerina book” (and calls it “Lovecraft meets Black Swan“). I enjoyed the blurb from Andrew Joseph White in that same thread: “[I Feed Her to the Beast] reminds us that when your enemies go low, you can always bury them there.”