What does carrion taste like? Andi has to know. The vultures circling outside her home taunt and invite her to come understand the secrets hiding in their banquet of decay. Fascination morphs into an obsessive need to know what the vultures know. Andi turns to Dr. Fawning, but even the therapist cannot help her comprehend the secrets she’s buried beneath anger-induced blackouts.Her girlfriend, … girlfriend, Luna, tries to help Andi battle her inner darkness and infatuation with the vultures. However, the desire to taste dead flesh, to stitch together wings of her own and become one with the flock sends Andi down a twisted, unforgivable path. Once she understands the secrets the vultures conceal, she must decide between abandoning the birds of prey or risk turning her loved ones into nothing more than meals to be devoured.
“Sara Tantlinger’s To Be Devoured capitalizes on our macabre preoccupation with the uglier side of nature, with love that topples into obsession, and with madness that is strangely beautiful in its barbarity. Her writing is equivalent to those unremitting avian beings her protagonist is so enamored of: It will hook its talons through your flesh, sink its neck into the ribboned edges of your wounds, and only relinquish your blighted body when it has swallowed your very soul.”
—Christa Carmen, author of Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, winner of the Indie Horror Book Awards for Best Debut Collection
“Vultures, obsession, and an unnatural hunger: What more can you want in a horror story? With To Be Devoured, Sara Tantlinger has done it again as she ratchets up the terror in wonderfully surprising ways while crafting prose that’s always a heady blend of the vicious and the vibrant. A book that’s absolutely not to be missed!”
—Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens
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As an avid horror reader, I’d like to think it takes quite a bit to gross me out and that an author has to go the extra mile to really unsettle me. I had a few scant notions of what this book was about, and I’ve read a few similarly-themed horror books in my time with little ill effects, so I figured I would handle To Be Devoured in similar fashion and I presumed I knew what I was getting into with this read, despite not having read Tantlinger before. It’s pretty rare that a passage or scene causes me to lose my appetite, let alone leave me feeling nauseated the rest of the day and threatening to lose my lunch. This isn’t because I’m some manly-man of horror, mind you. When I was in grade school, my friends (for lack of a better term, I suppose), found it quite entertaining to try and make me throw up during our daily lunchtime recess because I had such a weak stomach. Turns out, they did, at least, help fortify me; my stomach got tougher and I grew more desensitized to gross extremes. Or so I thought! Sara Tantlinger surprised the hell out of me with To Be Devoured, a deeply unsettling work that I made the grave mistake of reading during my lunch break with some greasy, drippy leftover ribs. To Be Devoured, you see, is all about eating, even if its central character has developed an exceptionally strange taste for a particular type of meat and some very certain flavors…
Andi is a severely mentally damaged woman following the violent death of her family as a child. Death seems to follow her around, in fact, as her therapist has also recently passed and she is becoming acquainted with a new one. She’s also having a spat with her lover, Luna, who was not exactly thrilled with Andi’s gift of art constructed from dead moths. Luna notes that her girlfriend becomes obsessed with the strangest things, and it’s an observation that bears out over the course of this novella. Andi spies some turkey vultures in the air and quickly grows obsessed with them, wishing she could become one with their flock. But in order to be accepted among the vultures, she must first adopt their carrion-eating ways.
To Be Devoured is a descent into madness and Tantlinger gives readers a front-row seat for Andi’s spiral into self-destruction. Lost in a grip of anxiety and depression, this troubled woman goes to extreme lengths in order to find her own place of belonging, even as she copes with her own history of loss and grief. For as slim as it is, this novella is an emotional powder keg, and Tantlinger doesn’t shy away from the extremes, either in Andi’s actions or her emotional states. This is a page-turner of the highest order, even as it screws with both your mind and your stomach. It’s every bit as revolting and disturbing as it is captivating.
Andi is the ultimate unreliable narrator and Tantlinger does a marvelous job planting numerous seeds to harvest in the book’s closing moments. Over the course of this book, you quickly discern that things are never quite right with Andi, and that wrongness reaches beyond even her the skewed perspective, but the payoff to all those quieter moments of observation and snatches of dialogue is richly rewarding in this book’s climax.
Tantlinger has crafted a brilliantly feminist take on cannibalism, with a few set pieces, particularly in its finale, that if ever committed to film could rival the grotesqueries of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal TV series. At the time of this writing, this book is currently listed as a finalist for the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards, and it’s exceedingly easy to see why. It’s an incredibly potent work, and I’m likely to have several of its scenes burned into my brain for life. To Be Devoured is a lush narrative, one that’s smartly told and intellectually gripping, even as it revels in mental and physical self-destruction (of, perhaps, both its central character and the reader themselves). It’s also a brilliant showcase for its author, a 2018 Bram Stoker Award winner for her poetry collection The Devil’s Dreamland. Tantlinger’s writing is eloquent, precise, and evocative — not mention deeply unsettling — and I hope that with this debut novella we’re in store for many more long-form prose works from her in the near future. To Be Devoured has left me craving plenty more from Sara Tantlinger.
Andi is a woman whose depression, anger, grief, and eating are all tangled up together. The eating isn’t anywhere near normal . . . because this is a horror story.:-)
You have to have a strong stomach to read this one. Even though the prose is poetic and a delight to read, it’s still a stomach-turning story. And it is so messed up, or rather Andi is. Evil creeps into Andi’s brain during her increasingly phantasmagoric musings.
Overall, To Be Devoured is gross and wonderful, a pleasure to read.
I’m super late to the Sara Tantlinger game, admittedly.
Until these last few days, I’ve only read one short story from her, which was in the fantastic anthology ‘The Twisted Book of Shadows.’
Michael Patrick Hicks and Richard Gerlach both practically begged me to read this novella, and after making my way through Sara’s upcoming poetry collection ‘Cradleland of Parasites,’ I knew I needed to dive in.
What I liked: ‘To Be Devoured’ follows Andi, a young woman struggling with a life filled with loss and grief. She’s found a connection with Luna, but we quickly see things take a turn when Andi begins to feel a deep ache within her soul.
Tantlinger’s gift is clearly in her prose and her love of language. Coming from a poetry background, numerous sentences and paragraphs in here are knee-buckling, so stunning you’ll almost whistle out loud.
A lot of this book reminded me of a cross between ‘Sick’ from Christa Wojciechowski and ‘Darkened Wings Flutter’ by Lou Yardley.
The cast of characters is small and tight, but Tantlinger uses each one masterfully.
What I didn’t like: For me at least, early on, a mild turn of phrase tipped me to the reality of her patient/doctor relationship, so it wasn’t as much as a gut punch when we find out all the details. Very minor, some will see it and some won’t, but otherwise this was perfection.
Why you should buy it: If you love super dark stories with horrific events and even worse deaths, ‘To Be Devoured’ will tick all those boxes and still make you want to bathe in Listerine.
This was a really stark look at extremes, but one story that does it fantastically.