Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
Queer horror lies at the heart of Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s second novel, a sexy and smart inquiry into what it means to belong
Candenze is a small, backward town set high in the mountains and nobody goes there. The Siccos are a sprawling family as much a part of the landscape as Big Joe the mountain, a single girl born to each generation. San Rocco is evoked often and rarely associated with the Catholic religion he belongs to; Candenze takes its morals from old stories, whispers and folklore.
Angelina Sicco loves it though, it’s her hometown and her project. She’s working to turn it into a queer outpost as (almost) the only lesbian in town, and it’s working – sort of. Until she accidentally wakes a monster, something from deep in the pit, and it’s hungry.
Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s second novel together, Feast While You Can is a vivid queer horror that toes the line between the supernatural and the purely paranoid. The monster is terrifying, and it might all be in your head. Staging a complex critique into isolated, strange places and what it means to ‘develop’ them – set against the inescapable visibility of being queer and brown in a white, straight space – Feast While You Can mines the heart of what it means to belong, and to escape. Clements and Datta’s writing is sure; by turns unsettling and exciting and always seeking to climb inside you. Writing queerness, and queer sex, deftly and effectively is not easy, but this book makes it look it.