Book review of Feast While You Can

The wife-and-wife team of Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta (The View Was Exhausting) are back with Feast While You Can, a queer horror-romance about a monster that feasts on the “passion, heartbreak and mess” of life. 

Angelina Sicco has lived in the small European mountain town of Cadenze for her entire life. The large Sicco family is entrenched in the conservative community, and Angelina is well-liked despite being a lesbian. But this was not the case for Jagvi, Angelina’s brother’s ex-girlfriend. After Jagvi broke up with him and came out as a lesbian, she moved away. In the decade since, each time Jagvi returns to Cadenze, she proves to be “the chaos element in Angelina’s equilibrium.” That is, until Angelina has a terrifying and visceral encounter with a monster, and realizes that Jagvi is the only thing that can hold it at bay. 

In Feast While You Can, Clements and Datta are firmly in the realm of psychological horror: A serial killer hiding in a closet isn’t the scariest thing in the room; rather, the underlying trauma of homophobia and racism feeds the horror and the menace. In the small community of Cadenze, the familiarity of family, friends and neighbors is both comforting and suffocating. This robust cast of secondary characters adds to the weighty conflicts between responsibility, family and self-preservation that Clements and Datta investigate, but at times the extended family drama is a distraction from the forward momentum. 

There are so many layers of horror, trauma and sexy trysts to unpack here, with the monster functioning as both a real entity and a manifestation of the taboo desire Angelina feels for Jagvi. It’s like an unseen devil on her shoulder, willing her to act out her most secret desires so it can live vicariously through her until there’s nothing left of her to give.

You might want to read this one with the lights on, lest you look over your shoulder and realize the monster’s in the room with you.