She's Always Hungry by Eliza Clark
Eliza Clark's debut short story collection She's Always Hungry explores destructive appetites and hungers for self-annihilation in every form
Fishwoman terrorises matriarchal village. Mean goth femdom bullies twink at work. Redpilled immortal cannibal meets her match post-apocalypse. Teen girl goes to dangerous lengths to cure her acne. Xenoarchaeologist slips in and out of the past as a hallucinogenic parasite spreads inside her. Bodies lose their integrity in Eliza Clark's sharp and voicey debut collection. Skin sloughs off to reveal what sits beneath. Characters eat and are eaten in turn, indulging insatiable hungers. Haunting, raucous, and often brutal, these stories confront us with our own modern obsessions with beauty, thinness, moral righteousness, but also our perhaps unreachable desires for rootedness, connection and absolution.
Clark jumps skilfully from genre to genre, creating an enjoyable whiplash that juxtaposes haunting, dreamlike science fiction with stickily humorous psychosexual realism. The collection does not lack for cohesion, though: be it for forbidden love, justice, domination, power, or human flesh, each character is dominated by destructive appetites and the hunger for self-annihilation. It poses the question of what it means to be possessed of a hunger that cannot be satisfied, creating a permeating sense of dread and deliberate irresolution. Besides these common threads, Clark's devotees will be pleased to find She's Always Hungry also infused with her characteristic, audacious wit, delivering chills alongside genuine, if shocked, laughs.