Equally parts vivid food description, gross out gore sequences, deeply unvanilla sex, and a charming yet vile narrator, this book isn’t for the faint of heart.

This book does a wonderful job with the richness and specificity of the descriptions. They are incredibly intense and bring some of the truly disgusting and truly hedonistic to life. There are particularly distasteful scenes that almost read as a mentally projected horror film. Having Dorothy’s profession be a food writer is a natural choice, because the author is able to create imagery and description that are vivid and imaginative.

This book is not for everyone. If a morally bankrupt protagonist with no guilt who literally murders and consumes men is not something you think will sit well with you, then perhaps skip this one. But this is truly another wonderful addition to the pantheon of charming yet despicable narrators giving us play-by-plays of their misdeeds.

My only qualm with this book is that sometimes the narrator is so self-serious and pretentious, her narrative vocabulary so unnecessarily advanced that the fact that character being an unrepentant cannibal seems realistic by comparison. Sometimes the satire of the food writing scene is slathered on so thick that it actually suspends the illusion and is a little too on the nose. Walking some of that back a half-step would have achieved the aims just as well, perhaps even better.