from the pen of icarus blake

This Delicious Death is a young adult horror novel by Kayla Cottingham following four girls struggling with their ghoulish urges to eat people.  Each of these girls is also queer.  What follows will have spoilers — read at your own risk.

The central conceit of this book revolves around an event we only ever see in flashbacks: the Hollowing.  An event in which a random assortment of people contracted some sort of virus (linked to a green cloud of… something?) and developed ghoulish features and a ravenous hunger for human flesh.  Once well fed, the ghouls become human again.  On paper, the only difference between a human and a ghoul is that the latter needs to eat human flesh to survive.  Herein lies my first issue with the book: ghouls are a heavy-handed metaphor for queer people.

Ghouls face discrimination, are sent to facilities designed to control and care for the ghoul in them.  Their parents are afraid of them, people think they should die or live “separate but equal” lives.  The rhetoric is painfully similar to every “I’m not homophobic” person’s stance on gay people (or, equally, “I’m not racist” people’s stance on black/muslim/indigenous folks).

But, like.  Ghouls eat people.  That is a concrete threat to health and safety.  People could die if a ghoul misses a meal, tracking ghouls is a necessary step to coexistence if you don’t want something terrible to happen.  I have to imagine that murder rates skyrocketed after the Hollowing because of the ghouls reintegrated into society.  They pose a real, tangible threat to the people in their immediate vicinity — and the book actually depicts this on multiple occasions.  The main character gets so angry she nearly ghouls out on some random men based on their anti-ghoul comments.  One of the four girls literally kills and eats one of them later when she’s drugged without her knowledge (we’ll get to that).  The existence of a tangible threat makes this a terrible queer metaphor — it lends credence to the idea that queer people are dangerous, that they should be separated or oppressed.  It’s a bad metaphor.  A bad metaphor that didn’t need to exist.  The characters are already queer.

This brings me to my next big issue: the modern idea that if you are queer, you must also be good.  This is an idea that I see prevalently in liberal queer circles, which descend into toxicity because the performance of good becomes more important than the fact that you are queer and a person.  I can tell the author runs in these circles, because the main characters feel performative in every aspect of their identity.  There’s a textual obsession with having a diverse cast to the point where two of the main characters are partially defined by the fact that they’re latina and black.  Every side character is introduced like a tumblr bio — race, gender, pronouns — without giving you any insight into the personhood of the character presented.  I have never cared less about the fact that someone is a butch lesbian.

The black and latina main characters rely so heavily on stereotypes to shape their character that reading them made my skin crawl.  The latina girl is boy crazy, the black girl is aloof and as mean as the narrative will allow her to be without her flipping into the realm of villain as the narrative defines it.  On the flip side, the trans character in the main cast is allowed no faults.  She dresses impeccably, she passes perfectly.  She’s sweet and demure, everyone loves her, she has not one single flaw to the point of being a paper woman because the author is afraid to take her off the pedestal.  Heaven forbid she be human, and not anything less than an angel with a little extra something in her panties.  Are we surprised that she’s the main character’s love interest?

This toxic obsession with the goodness of ghouls and queers alike poisons the plot as well.  The only men in this narrative are straight, first of all, and also the villains out to ruin the lives of ghouls everywhere by causing a murder rampage at a music festival using a drug that turns ghouls into what the narrative calls “anthropophagi”.  Think the typical elongated gaunt humanoid with sharp claws and jagged teeth, unhinging its jaw to consume you in ragged chunks.

And I have already done the monster more justice than the book.

This would be a great monster, this would be a great threat if the author let the ghouls be the threat they are.  If these main characters had to grapple with the very real risk of killing people around them, if there was emotional weight to this loss of control, but there’s not.  Allowing that risk, allowing that weight would require the characters to falter in their goodness.  The anthropophagi are immediately established to be people — even when they’re actively killing and eating other people — and worthy of saving.  From that moment on, the narrative won’t allow them to be killed or harm the main characters.  It hands the main characters a get-out-of-jail-free card in a beefy cattle prod, and the threat vanishes.  One of the villains is redeemed, and the others are left for dead in the endgame setting — never once threatened by the main characters because doing so would impair the author’s depiction of them as good queers.

This book hit a number of nerves for me, from the ham-fisted metaphor to the reduction of every character to a list of Harry Potter race-gender headcanons circa 2014.  I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.  I’ve had more than enough of these kinds of narratives that try to elevate queer and racially diverse casts above human in the interest of representation.  The only thing horrifying about this book is the author’s performance of being a “good queer author”.