Mikaella Clements has had fiction published in Overland Scum Mag and Voiceworks and her short story Twin Season was awarded an honourable mention in the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize Her nonfiction has been published widely She lives in Berlin with her wife and a foolish cat. Let me preface with the fact that I usually don t read horror I tend to go for witchy romances maybe a bit of occult mystery But I really liked this book I ll admit it started a bit slow but once it picked up I couldn t get enough The portrayal of growing up different in a small town was so accurate and I wonder if that s why it felt slow for me at first because it s a slow and sleepy small town The town is functionally it s own character in this book and the way our histories cling to us I thought the monster and how it wove in and out was handled brilliantly Especially the moments where you don t know the monster is there at first Definitely would recommend this as a reasonably quick read Feast While You Can In a word DELICIOUS But okay words Set blessedly in the 90s without being all period piece about it Feast While You Can populates a tiny Italian countryside town called Cadenze with siblings Angelina and Patrick Sicco their sometimes helpful and sometimes notsomuch extended family a crew of colorful locals and a town square featuring a fountain with a giant hand sculpture in the middle that just sounds cool as hell The story begins when Jagvi currently a hot single butch lesbian now in your area and formerly Patrick s girlfriend yikes returns to town just in time for a party in a cave from whence Angelina emerges unsettled by Jagvi s reappearance and also accompanied by the cave s storied malevolent entity now in your head also yikes It s a take on possession horror that ll have you looking with disdain on every previous attempt that cluttered up the point with Catholicism when clearly what you should REALLY dread is what if your body was taken over by something simultaneously truly evil a bitch and also a troll What s terrifying than being under the control of an entity that s fucking your entire life up while giggling about it to your face What we forget when watching the flailing bodies and banana peel slips of slapstick comedy is that actually all that falling ends in bruises contusions and broken bones Seriously one particular scene on a mountainside is going to haunt me But by far the sweetest stickiest part of this book is the LESBIANISM of it all as rich and indulgent as every thick ribbon of caramel in a pint of expensive ice cream I love yearning as much as the next big ol queer and will contentedly pine alongside a main character until I want to scream but this book really revels in the sheer inescapable HORNINESS of desperately wanting someone you don t think you can have Feast While You Can is about two women who have absolutely had sex with other people before this but ohhhh my god every dripping moment of want will have you yourself feeling like you sure haven t and you have to oh my god it s giving gay sex propaganda it s giving oh right that s what it felt like to be a virgin it will have you tense as hell when you re not squirming and you will emerge from it all thinking about the significant weight of a hand on the back of your neck And thinking about it And thinking about it The modern parlance would have me deem it spicy but that is a vast understatement It s a five hour marathon of Hot Ones and you periodically will become one of the celebrities that just starts crying I can t think about the first sex scene too much because I just start brooding about whether or not I should get on Tinder Should I God women are SO good And it s all backlit by lives that feel incredibly real full of deeply complicated relationships with friends and family jobs that are alternately important and meaningful or just for a paycheck fair the relatable desire to just like go to the local bar and throw back a few and the genuine and frightening feeling of being in love with somebody who wants different things than you do in an uncompromisable way It tackles the difficulty of growing up as women of color surrounded by a bunch of small town racists and the willingness to make multiple handshake deals with the devil to survive it vs doing what you need to do to GTFO without shying away from the conflict this causes between the two people going through it The writing is evocative vivid and lyrical and often incredibly fucking funny One exchange about strap ons had me laughing out loud while also making me rethink heterosexual relationships entirely If you re a fellow bisexual watch out this book might have legally ticked me up one notch on the Kinsey Scale I was on tenterhooks leading up to the end with absolutely no idea how they were going to resolve this enormous pickle of a lesbian horror show affectionate and when I say it stuck the landing like MY GOD Perfect Exquisite Chef s kiss 10 10 Frankly consume me daddy This novel is a love letter to hunger And baby it will feed you soooo good My thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC and to Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta for this absolute banger Feast While You Can I m not usually a monster fan but this was delightful A gripping plot and engaging writing really get me hooked on this one This will be such a fun spooky read when it releases in time for the Halloween season Feast While You Can my first arc this book fell into my lap and it felt like fate it s so well written yet easy to read that i ate it up so quickly some parts were a bit slower than i wanted and by the end i was ready to get to the climax but it was wonderful to get to know the characters inside and out i don t usually go for horror types but i love books about things sort of consuming ppl and this was a well executed and interesting version of that it was dark and sexy and funny and really just toe curling in all the good ways Feast While You Can This was SO good It was queer it was hot and it was horror all at once and it was simply the best Like this should be a movie and it would be so much better than love lies bleeding Pls someone make it HAPPEN Feast While You Can 
you GUYSSSS im so incredibly down bad for jagvi you don t understand small town haunted by an ancient monster gets me every time Feast While You Can 3. Angelina is the defacto princess of the small mountain town of Cadenze Mixed race and queer she uses her charisma and deep familial roots to charm her town into accepting her Where some might find her role suffocating she revels in it loving her town with her whole self. Full of rich allegory and beautiful prose Feast While You Can straddles that fantastic line between being literary and being eminently readable With so many moving parts it would be easy to lose sight of one in favor of the other Slow burn horror queer romance dynastic family drama But they are interwoven expertly In a year full of fantastic books this one is easily a top contender for my book of the year Absolutely delicious ARC provided by NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing Feast While You Can A lesbian queering of a familiar horror trope Angelina lives in an isolated rural Italian town She is gay and has always felt like an outsider in this conservative village and yet despite this she has no desire to leave and she resents those who have moved away for bigger cities Her brother s ex Jagvi came out as gay and moved to a larger neighbouring city but Angelina feels existentially chained to her hometown enad with Jagvi but still refusing to see her home as provincial backwater She doubly embodies the idea of queer failure neither living up to the heteronormative expectations of her family nor conforming to the hipster urbanism of the other queer people in her life One day at a family gathering where her brother and cousins trade local folklore about a monster lurking in a nearby cave Angelina inadvertently provokes the very same enigmatic creature a primordial being which periodically feeds off the lives futures and loved ones of those in the town The creature often just described as the thing follows her to her home attacks her and demonically inhabits her thoughts In order to fend off the monster Angelina and Jagvi must confront their unrequited feelings for one another and embrace all their desires to defeat it. Simply described as the thing the monster in this tale obviously alludes to the scifi classic The Thing From Another Planet but in its wild descriptions of insatiable appetite and wolfish feeding the novel gestures to the 1983 classic The Hunger about a seductive Sapphic vampire who woos and traps men and women alike subsisting off human blood to maintain her ageless immortality One might also think of Stephen King s It a similar horror novel in which an unnameable creature returns every generation to feed off the unfulfilled lives of children This novel adds queer messiness to this veritable tradition of genre fiction with rollicking drama and sex Feast While You Can RATING 5 5 STARSI was actually shocked by how much I loved this novel because horror is my least read genre but it s MIKAELLA CLEMENTS and ONJULI DATTA of the THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING so I should have known FEAST WHILE YOU CAN would be just as decadent and unputdownable WOW where to start1 CADENZEThe ugly beautiful setting of this book was a quasi character in itself The small town of Cadenze afforded a touch of anthropomorphism felt like a breathing entity that was mysterious and a little wild infused into Angelina and at points amorphous like the monster evil spirit Angelina s anchor to home and Jagvi s pull away from it created a really dynamic point of conflict. 2 THE MONSTERReading the scenes with the monster made me realize it had been a while since a book brought me to the edge of my seat sweating barely blinking at one point I was forced to stop reading and do life things but I was in a thrall until I could get back to this book I thought this monster was especially scary in an incredibly creative and slippery way I don t want to spoil anything so trust me that the psychological warfare this monster unleashed was quite something. 3 ANGELINA AND JAGVI AND PATRICKI had to include all three of them in this bullet point because I was just CAPTIVATED by this messy dynamic My reading of this book was serendipitously timed shortly after the release of the HIT ME HARD AND SOFT album and apart from that soundtrack being a great backdrop to this shadowy novel Angelina and Patrick s relationship was absolutely giving Billie and Finneas I loved the exploration of interdependence obligation unconditional love and protectiveness in their bond AND ON TOP OF THAT Jagvi s interplay in that relationship and secrets that laid there just a wild ride The tension between Angelina and Jagvi was stretched out so perfectly the reader could bask in it And you can imagine all of those emotions amid the horrific persecutory atmosphere the monster createdI devoured this terrifying and risqu novel in essentially a single setting and highly recommend for romance horror fans looking for something to sink their teeth into Feast While You Can
| Feast While You Can By Mikaella Clements |
| 153874225X |
| 9781538742259 |
| English |
| 304 |
| Hardcover |