Feast While You Can

by Mikaella Clements, Onjuli Datta

Overview

For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, an "exciting new hybrid horror-romance" about queer love in a small town that serves as an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life is a monster ready to possess us all (New York Times Book Review).

Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that's dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. 

Upon Jagvi's arrival, an ancient evil is awakened, and a monstrous force infiltrates Angelina's life. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it — the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538742259
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	10/29/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta are the co-authors of THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING, a Goop and Good Housekeeping book club pick and named "a perfect summer read" by Vogue. Between them, their writing has been published in the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, White Review, Slate and more. They are married and live in Berlin.
 

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2024

In this tantalizing novel from married authors Clements and Datta (The View Was Exhausting), a horny lesbian is possessed by a monster. Angelina Sicco lives with her divorced friend Gemma and protective brother, Patrick, in “tiny ugly” Cadenze, a conservative Italian hamlet. The town only gets tourists during the summer months, when Angelina does what she can to satiate her libido. Her world is upended by the reappearance of “dykey” Jagvi, a childhood friend and Patrick’s ex, who, since her departure from Cadenze, has become smug and condescending. The Siccos joke about a folkloric soul-devouring monster called “the thing,” purported to live in the area’s caves, where they sometimes go to party. When the thing follows Angelina home one night, she becomes violently possessed by it. She turns for help to Jagvi, and the women reckon with their long-simmering mutual desire and resentment as they work to vanquish the evil spirit. With arresting body horror, electric suspense, and intense sex scenes, the story moves at a breakneck clip. This carefully calibrated tale of queer desire is a feast for the senses. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2024-08-17
A young queer woman who's lived her whole life in the dead-end mountain village of Cadenze finds herself violently possessed by an ancient, malevolent, memory-eating entity that inhabits the caves bordering her home.

This novel tells the story of Angelina Sicco, who's determined to be content with the cards she's been dealt—both good and bad—and her generally uneventful small-town existence. All that begins to change, however, when her brother Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, Jagvi, returns to Cadenze. Jagvi is hardheaded, undeniably alluring, and fiercely loyal to the Sicco siblings despite their complicated past, and Angelina struggles to deny her growing attraction to her. The tension between them gradually ramps up in intensity until it feels like one or the other will have to give in to their emotions or go mad with desire, propelling the story forward at a rapid pace. To make matters more complicated, Jagvi’s return to Cadenze appears to have awakened an ancient creature lying dormant in the caves surrounding their home. It soon attaches itself to Angelina, who finds that the only thing that keeps the creature conveniently at bay is Jagvi’s touch. Throughout the novel, Cadenze itself feels like a living, breathing entity. It’s full of life, character, local lore, and the complicated relationships harbored by all small towns, fictional or otherwise. Similarly, the novel’s portrayal of growing up queer in an isolated location never feels disingenuous or overwrought, adding a different layer of anxiety and complexity to the story. These emotions, in turn, deftly weave in and out of the horror created by Cadenze’s resident monster.

A fresh, queer spin on possession horror with a sharp focus on deeply complex small-town dynamics.

Kirkus Reviews

[An] exciting new hybrid horror-romance. . . Where the novel sings is in its representations of queer life and desire. . .Queer women have always been part of the horror genre. But in the capable, beckoning hands of Clements and Datta, we get to see the story from their perspective, with monsters made not from them, but for them. In Feast While You Can, queer desire is the cure, not the curse, and it will satiate readers who have subsisted for too long on the crumbs of representation.”
—New York Times Book Review

"In this sexy, scary novel, a monstrous force that feeds on passion awakes, and Angelina has to stop it before it eats her life — literally. A delightfully queer romp that doesn't skimp on the steam or the scares."

—People Magazine

"[A] tantalizing novel. . . With arresting body horror, electric suspense, and intense sex scenes, the story moves at a breakneck clip. This carefully calibrated tale of queer desire is a feast for the senses."—Publishers Weekly

"Cadenze itself feels like a living, breathing entity. It’s full of life, character, local lore, and the complicated relationships harbored by all small towns, fictional or otherwise. Similarly, the novel’s portrayal of growing up queer in an isolated location never feels disingenuous or overwrought, adding a different layer of anxiety and complexity to the story. These emotions, in turn, deftly weave in and out of the horror created by Cadenze’s resident monster. A fresh, queer spin on possession horror with a sharp focus on deeply complex small-town dynamics."—Kirkus Reviews

"A love story both modern and timeless, Feast While You Can is also the one-that-got-away horror fable of your dreams. I fell so hard for this family and the spirited loyalty they have for one another. What a delicious, original, dark-and-stormy-night of a novel."—Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury

"FEAST WHILE YOU CAN is a singingly clever and gnarly tale of hunger and possession. Lesbian pulp meets literary horror—truly unlike anything else. The sexiest book you'll read this year!"—Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep

"Feast While You Can is a truly monstrous romance, by turns alluring and appalling, sexy and grotesque, kinky and transportive. It's Call Me By Your Name meets Stephen King's It, for lesbians. It threw me against the wall and I loved it."—Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea and Private Rites

"Messy lesbians fight a horrifying monster in a small town. Sophisticated and terrifying, it genre splices so well that it's not a splice any more. I've never read anything like it!"—Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb series

"So scary you won't want to sleep alone... so sexy you definitely won't want to sleep alone! Seriously hot, deeply unnerving, Feast While You Can deserves to be gobbled up in a single sitting. From the crepuscular setting, to the beautifully rendered characters, this is a powerhouse of queer horror. And while Angelina is a brilliantly brattish protagonist, it's Jag - unforgettable Jag - who joins the ranks of Byronic heroes." —Victoria Gosling, author of Bliss and Blunder

"Terrifying, darkly funny, and hauntingly sexy, Feast While You Can is definitely making it onto my list of favorite reads for 2024.”—BookTrib

"This book takes a bold and seemingly effortless swing for the fences of literary horror: beautiful, greedy and terrifying, it makes an intimate home for itself right alongside your bones. Add to that the vividly realised characters and setting, and a queer romance full of yearning and heat, and you get a unique story that I'll be thinking about forever."—Freya Marske, internationally bestselling author of A Marvellous Light

"An erotic, feral masterpiece that straddles the imagined borders between lust and horror, crafting a new kind of folklore that taps into the very essence of desire. Impossible to put down, but you must try—because a literary feast like this should be enjoyed slowly."—Jennifer Neal, author of Notes on Her Color

“Genuinely very scary, genuinely very romantic. The best lesbian book I’ve ever read."—Grace Curtis, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Idolfire

“Feast While You Can has the delicious compulsion of a thriller and all the lush prose and tenderness of a love story. I devoured it and it will devour you.”—Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark

"Horribly compelling, smart and so sexy. However much I wanted to turn away from Feast While You Can, I just couldn't quite bring myself to. A masterfully told, utterly grotesque love story."—Laura Kay, author of The Split

“It was sexy, it gave me night terrors, 10/10 would do again.” —C.L. Clark, Nebula-winning author of The Unbroken

“Vivid, immersive, and crafted with richly stunning prose, Feast While You Can is a frightening and sensual exploration of possession and eroticism. A fanged literary dalliance poised to disturb and arouse in equal measure.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

PRAISE FOR THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING

"A perfect summer read."—Vogue

“The View Was Exhausting is a pure delight! Effortlessly cool, razor sharp, and crazy fun—I couldn’t put it down. It is Notting Hill for 2021, an absolute crowd pleaser.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

"An absolutely stellar debut with tension that crackles and prose that sings, The View Was Exhausting is the complex, Hollywood love story we've all been waiting for. Clements and Datta have crafted a book that's as heartfelt and earnest as it is sharp and surprising—I couldn't get enough."

—Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation

“I read it all in one morning and couldn't put it down once, which frankly was of huge disadvantage to me because I had work to do. The View Was Exhausting is enormously sophisticated, tension held like a net, as it slowly holds the reader closer and closer to a fire, and I laughed many times. It’s an absolute tour de force, and Win is now one of my new favorite protagonists ever.“

—Tamsyn Muir, New York Times bestselling author of Gideon the Ninth

From the Publisher