For queer women, horror and hunger have stuck cheek by jowl since at least the time of “Carmilla,” the ur-Sapphic vampire novel from 1872. The figure of the devouring lesbian is both a symbolic inversion of the good, sacrificing mother and a tantalizing embodiment of the male terror of cunnilingus. But this familiar paradigm is queerly inverted in “Feast While You Can,” Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s exciting new hybrid horror-romance novel. Angelina and Jagvi, the novel’s monster-crossed lovers, race to escape an ancient entity that wants to devour more than just their bodies.
As the novel begins, Angelina is living with her brother, Patrick, in Cadenze, the rural Italian mountain town where they grew up. Patrick and Angelina’s sprawling family is a pillar of the working-class community, and Angelina is particularly favored. Jagvi grew up alongside them but as an outsider (she’s brown and butch and vocally dissatisfied with their provincial hometown), and she left as soon as it was possible. When Jagvi returns to Cadenze to sell her father’s home, the painful tangle of their relationships reignites.
Years earlier, when they were in high school, Jagvi broke Patrick’s heart, and though they are close friends now, Patrick’s family never forgave her (Angelina included). For their part, Angelina and Jagvi have always sniped at each other, using sarcasm to maintain a distance rather than acknowledge an attraction that could shatter Patrick all over again. But when a mysterious spirit begins to possess Angelina during Jagvi’s visit, the three accidentally discover that the only thing that can break the monster’s hold over Angelina is Jagvi’s touch, forcing them together.
“Feast While You Can” is lightly set in the 1990s, which mostly just means there are no cellphones in the story, but there are occasional references to the riot grrrl folk singer Ani DiFranco. The central monster is a clever enfleshing of the homophobia of the era and the way it limited opportunities for queer people. “Its attention felt like Cadenze itself,” Angelina notes. Early in the novel, Jagvi says that provincial Cadenze “swallows up options,” which is what the monster does as well, rooting through the minds of its victims to devour their memories, and spiraling forward to experience and erase all their possible futures until no one remembers its victims ever existed.
Like many creative works set in the queer ’90s, the book doesn’t grapple with the pervasiveness of the period’s xenophobia. Although the monster as metaphor for homophobia is strong, the representation of actual homophobia and racism is rather weak: noted on a surface level, but for the most part, vaporous and indistinct. Perhaps Clements and Datta rightly intuit that more explicit references would swamp the lighter, more adventurous, exciting, fantastical and erotic parts of the novel. But readers familiar with the era may feel ungrounded.
Where the novel sings, however, is in its representations of queer life and desire. Jagvi’s hands are continually eroticized through Angelina’s gaze. “And those hands,” she waxes early on, “hanging open at her sides, square fingers beckoning.” Later, readers are drawn again to cast our eyes on Jagvi’s fingers, particularly the “capable crook to her knuckles.” There are also several discussions of packers, strap-ons and vibrators. Jagvi’s butchness is handled with great nuance, inviting the questions of gender identity that readers of today might hold, but never pushing the dialogue or descriptions to an anachronistic place.
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.
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