There’s a new trend in horror fiction: the female cannibal. In Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part (2025), a college student eats the eyeballs of the men who fetishise her. In Delilah S. Dawson’s
Bloom (2023), the love interest, who appears to be living a fantasy version of cottage life, is actually including body parts in her organic homemade goods. In Chelsea G. Summers’ novel A Certain Hunger (2021), a remorseless food critic cooks her lovers.
You can find cannibals in three more novels published last year alone: Lucy Rose’s literary folk horror sensation The Lamb, Olivie Blake’s Girl Dinner and Catherine Dang’s What Hunger. They follow Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty (2023), Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings (2020) and many more.
Cannibalism is not a new theme in horror, of course. There is Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, people as food in Solyent Green – and last year’s hit Apple series, Pluribus.
But the new wave of cannibal novels are written by women. These books feature man-eaters who are gory, graphic and distinctly feminist. The female cannibal has become a radical figure, who satisfies her cravings. These are stories about women who are violent, angry and resistant.
Horror thrives in times of anxiety. Renowned authors, such as Ann Radcliffe in the late 18th century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Shirley Jackson in the mid 20th century, have explored the themes of isolation, domestic abuse and the suffocating nature of patriarchy through horror writing.
In Cannibalism in Literature and Film, literary scholar Jennifer Brown asserts that the cannibal “reflects and embodies fears of specific times and spaces”. But contemporary feminist horror novels also encourage deeper questions.
In A Certain Hunger, protagonist Dorothy turns her male lovers into gourmet meals, while lamenting the double standards within patriarchal America. Ji-won, the protagonist of The Eyes are the Best Part, literally consumes the male gaze by eating the eyeballs of her mother’s new leering boyfriend.
These female cannibals are not just committing crimes of self-defence or vengeance. They enjoy the hunt, the kill, the meal. They are literal man-eaters, pushing the boundaries of traditional idealised femininity.
Female cannibals are not thinking about weight gain or calorie intake. They relish their food and become more powerful because of it. The female cannibal feasts, gorges and unapologetically takes pleasure in her gruesome banquet. She takes up space as a powerful (albeit bloodthirsty) victim turned villain.
In The Eyes are the Best Part, the Korean-American protagonist takes advantage of harmful stereotypes about Asian women to direct suspicion away from herself. “After all, why would he suspect docile, sweet, submissive Ji-won?” she remarks. “Why would I, a woman, let alone an Asian woman, challenge his authority?”
Her novel provides food for thought about expected norms, performative activism and the prioritisation of white male entitlement.
Cannibals and body anxiety
Our society’s assumption is that the “ideal” female body is white, cisgender, small and submissive. Feminist horror that centres consumption prompts a question: who benefits when women are hungry? Who benefits when we are preoccupied with becoming physically smaller?
The very first page of gender theorist Brian Pronger’s book Body Fascism (2002) describes
the allure of imitating the body standards shown on our screens. People of all ages and identities, he observes, are not immune to the “personal security it represents”. To fit in is to be desirable. To be desirable is to be safe.
Striving to look like the newer, tinier, “ideal” woman is a political decision that is often unconscious. Body fascism, according to sociologist Kass Gibson, “links idealised body shapes … with notions of morally praiseworthy and responsible citizenship”.
These new cannibal novels rage against these pressures.
In Kim’s book, her Asian protagonist seethes against her mother’s racist, domineering boyfriend – but craves his blue eyeballs, leading her on a binge of eyeball consumption. In trans author Gretchen Felker-Martin’s gender apocalypse novel, Manhunt, a virus turns anyone with testosterone into a cannibal beast. And in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 bestseller, Mexican Gothic, she literalises the idea of colonisers consuming the bodies of their subjects.
In the face of societal pressure to shrink themselves, or otherwise adapt their bodies to preferred norms, these women writers are enacting fantasies of dominance and control – or using cannibalism to call out cultural dominance.
Readers’ appetite for the female cannibal suggests a shared anxiety about the policing of our bodies – whether through prejudice or the unrealistic body standards back in fashion, with the rise of Ozempic and decline of body positivity (imperfect as it was). It also demonstrates a willingness to defy it.
