The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Dee
…[a] canny, funny, impressively detailed debut novel…Wilson is concerned only with detail, with specificity and precision in the moment, and it's that concern that marks her as a novelist of real substance and promise.
From the Publisher
"[A] canny, funny, impressively detailed debut novel ... [from] a novelist of real substance and promise."
—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] gripping, ambitious debut novel ...The drama builds palpably and haphazardly, drawing the invading crew and invaded population together until, in a moment of cathartic bloodshed, reality and fiction collide ... the story never flags thanks to the ferocious momentum of [Wilson’s] prose. This is a vivid, scary novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
"This is the smartest kind of horror, one that understands and enjoys the trappings while making us squirmingly aware of the moral contortions required to enjoy them. A highly unusual breath of fetid air."
—Booklist (starred review)
"[A]n exciting debut that reads like a perfectly paced horror novel but offers an unusually close and multilayered examination of violence and art."
—Library Journal
“Joining the ranks of recent hotly anticipated crime novels such as The Girls, Kea Wilson’s We Eat Our Own steps back to the 1970s with a blood-curdling horror story about making a movie in the Amazon.”
—Playboy
"This terrifying yarn never wavers for a moment."
—Providence Journal
"[A]n exciting, impressive debut."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[A]n engrossing, atmospheric and at times morbidly funny story that reads as a horrifying thriller and plays with deeper themes of art and artifice."
—Shelf Awareness
"Wilson's novel is a captivating look at the complicated relationship between human action and identity."
—Webster-Kirkwood Times
Kirkus Reviews
2016-06-22
This impressive debut novel chronicles the making of a shlock-schock movie in a South American jungle imbued with all-too-real late-20th-century horrors.One would have to be a pretty desperate actor to pursue a movie role like the one our nameless young protagonist, referred to throughout in the second person, snatches like an overripe, low-hanging mango sometime in 1979. Leaving his bewildered girlfriend behind in New York, this actor hops a plane to Colombia as a last-minute lead replacement in a jungle cannibalism chiller being slapped together by an enigmatic Italian filmmaker named Ugo Velluto, who's inflamed with the idea of making something more authentically scary than usual. And real life seems to be cooperating with Ugo's obsession: near an Amazonian shooting locale so remote that it doesn't have a phone line, there's a cadre of revolutionary guerillas who have entered a Faustian bargain with international drug traffickers. Some of this off-screen nastiness begins to gradually overlap with the graphic grossness being orchestrated by Ugo and his crew. Meanwhile, the actor struggles to find his way—and his character—in a project that's without a script and, seemingly, without clear direction beyond whatever comes to its increasingly erratic director's mind. Inspired by actual events, Wilson shows impressive command of a narrative that weaves back and forth and back again in both time and locale; much like the viewer of a pseudo-documentary horror movie (ever seen The Blair Witch Project?), you wonder throughout whether you should trust whatever it is you're told—and jumping to the end won't help at all. You shouldn't anyway, because Wilson's writing style is hypnotic, tightly wound, and harrowingly evocative of the story's stifling, bug-heavy atmosphere. Even the sunniest skies of this ill-starred shoot are thick with menace and portent. Keep telling yourself, "It's only a novel, it's only a novel" ... except an author's note at the end says it's inspired by actual events.
