Follow along begrudgingly as the main character Lizzie Prain slowly but surely, cooks and eats her (ex)husband.
Pros: written well enough that it thoroughly disturbed me and has me wondering if the author is actually a serial killer. Also, author has my name. Cons: poor plot, written in such grisly detail that it left me feeling sick. Also it was somehow boring.
⭐️
CW: BODY HORROR
Full disclosure, I chose to experience this story in audiobook form and in hindsight, this may have been a bad move. As I listened, I became physically uncomfortable which is saying A LOT because I regularly stream The Last Podcast on the Left every single night as I fall asleep. I tend to gravitate to the grisly, the macabre and the sadistic. However, this book gave me the ick and it wasn’t just me… my husband rolled over one night to tell me explicitly “I. Do. Not. Like. This. Book. At. All.” A member of my book club started the audio book and only made it a few chapters in before she declared that she would not be finishing it.
The words that came up consistently were: disgusting, twisted, concerning, graphic, unnecessary but also… boring.
It may be a little different if you just read it with your eyeballs, maybe that would allow you to distance yourself a bit more from the words on the page but honestly, it may have been just as gross. I don’t know… there was just something about hearing the author/main character describe cutting through the cartilage in her husband’s body that made the book borderline unreadable.
I was thankful when it was over.
Aside from the graphic discussion of the recipes she tested out with her husbands brain, limbs, organs, etc. I felt like the entire story was riding on the shock value and the shock value alone. I did not finish the book feeling like I got a good underlying story or plot to hold onto as I tried to navigate the winding river of ridiculous cannibalism. The disgusting monologue was the current that carried me away.
If asked to describe this book, I would say “this woman murdered her husband, cooked him and ate him over the course of weeks, slept with some other man, confessed to him and then left.” and then I would continue to discuss how abhorrent the book was. I couldn’t tell you why she murdered her husband, I didn’t feel like I was given a lot of backstory, there was little to no character development… if I had just killed my husband and was in the process of eating him to get rid of the evidence, I feel like I would be hitting some very high highs and some extremely low lows. Crying fits, nervous breakdowns, dissociation followed by a few days of just numbness, etc.
Granted, that could have been in the book more than I am remembering, but the awful descriptions of the cannibalism are what stuck with me the most. They overshadowed any hope of a good story within these pages.
I will say, I feel like a wuss for saying all of this. “You claim to love true crime but you can’t even handle a bit of fictional sensationalism and body horror?”
No, no I can’t. Not with THIS book anyway. I recently read another body horror book and I enjoyed that and will be reviewing it soon.
Most of this story felt unnecessary and like too much thought went into writing the recipes and bringing the idea of eating someone to life in the mind of the reader that a lot of other things got lost in the shuffle.
I was happy when the book was over, I won’t be reading it again.
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