Feast While You Can is just that, a feast!

A feast of character development wrapped up in a body horror, enveloped in some sapphic lust and then lovingly cradled in family trauma.

Angelina, My Dog, Jagvi and Patrick are incredibly written characters with all their flaws and so damn human you can't help but get utterly devoured by their story.

I really enjoyed Feast While You Can. It's one of those horrors where in the world it is built in, everything makes sense and fits together really well. The ending is very satisfying, and we don't waste loads of time at the start for the mc to convince other people the horror is real, so it allows us to dive into the story and the relationships that make it up.
I would genuinely recommend this as a decent horror.

I loved this book - one of my top 10 for the year.

Creepy, sexy, romantic, tense, queer ... this was a fantastic read that I have been recommending to everyone.

i love lesbians vs the void.

there were bits of this that worked more than others maybe, but in general i thought it was a big romping slay.

Unfortunately this one really didn’t work for me, to the point that I ended up putting it down at the 18% mark. I found the writing to be really quite lovely but it seemed to lack substance, I never felt called to turn the page and find out what was to happen next. I enjoyed the descriptions of the town and thought the environment they lived in quite really came to life in the prose but the conversations between characters seemed forced and stilted with nothing flowing as naturally as I would have liked.

In all, gorgeous cover and title, very exciting author blurbs, but content that in the end just wasn’t for me.

I had really high hopes for this one but I just couldn't get into the writing style and the pace was far too slow

Monster smut! But make it literary!
This is a delicious romance-horror from the wife-writer duo Mikaella Clements; Onjuli Datta, who wrote the excellent The View Was Exhausting a few years back. Feast While You Can is a serious departure from their debut: it's a novel about family, about the monsters we keep inside us, and about love. It's also about the horrors of intergenerational trauma, which, for me, is always a fascinating topic.

Angelina and Patrick Sicco (hahaha...yes!) are siblings living in the rural, run-down town of Cadenze. Don't ask me where it is - it seems to exist in an alternate US/Italy hybrid, mountainous, rustic, and vaguely American. Both Patrick and Angelina are defensive of the town to the point of fanatacism, partly as their family has lived there for generations. Angelina is gay and a little directionless. She spends her days working two jobs and picking up any pretty girls who pass through the town.

But when spiky, sexy Jagvi - the town exile, ex-girlfriend of Patrick - returns to Cadenze, a chance trip to a local cave together finds Angelina gripped by forces beyond her control. The forces? A big, old-fashioned, terrifying monster, hell-bent on a big ol' meal. The monsters started out slightly goofy (a GoodReads review compared the voice of the monster to Venom, and they are spot on) but as it grows in power it becomes something much more terrifying. The Thing From The Pit consumes people in their entirety - not just body and soul, but their memories, futures, and the memories everyone else has of that person. They are completely wiped from existence. It is horrifying!

The novel becomes more suffocating as the plot becomes more terrifying - and it all adds up to an impressive, propulsive read, albeit one that's a little slow to start. The small cast of characters is well-crafted and the reader gets under their skin (I can't help myself!) quickly, particularly in Angelina's case as she's our point-of-view character for most of the book.

I feel like this book will fly under the radar, which is such a shame, as it deserves to find its audience of horror-romance fans. Strongly recommend this one if you enjoyed Our Wives Under The Sea or Sara Gran's novels. It's a banger!

I could not stop reading this book, it was unlike anything I have ever read, completely unique and enthralling

This book was a glorious and unexpected find that I page-turningly devoured!

I loved the well-written folk horror feel of the small-town otherness. The town of Cadenze springs to life on the page, hemming the characters in and setting the reader on edge.

Our main character, Angelina, is so realistically human. She's not a perfect one-dimensional character with their shit together... no, she's a messy human who makes wrong choices, fills their life with mistakes, takes chances, and has no idea what she's doing.

Will anything be left to mess up in Angelina's life before the monster wants to mess everything up for her?

This is not a vapid surface-level story. The complexity and layers of generational trauma, secrets, lies, and unhealthy relationships all weave together to form a backdrop to this psychological horror.

The sapphic representation is great, and the monster is written so well that it's difficult to do it justice in this review without giving away spoilers.

There is so much packed into this story and a few twists I didn't see coming.

The whole experience of reading this was wonderful, and I will definitely be looking to read more by these authors!


*I received an advance reader copy for free, and I'm voluntarily leaving a review*

I didn't know what to expect from this one but it fit so well for spooky season. The combination of small town dynamics, folklore horror and slightly forbidden (1990's, older brother's ex-girlfriend) sapphic romance was just delicious.

The thing from the pit was actually creepy, and I was so surprised to see it so soon. I could feel the kinship between it and Angelina from the start. Similar to Angelina I also had conflicting feelings about it - I wanted it to come back, I wanted to know what it's motives were, but it was so spooky I was scared for all or the side characters we had quickly come to love. Patrick, Gemma and of course Jag. Everyone felt true and realistic as characters, I loved them all (except maybe Caro, but who can blame me). With reflection, maybe the plot wasn't the most original in the world, but the authors were so good at getting me into Angelina's head that I didn't see many of the major plot points or twists coming. <spoiler> I am still so sad about My Dog though, poor baby didn't know what was going on </spoiler>

The tension between Jagvhi and Angelina was brilliant from the start. I was screaming at them to kiss from the get go, and the payoff was SO GOOD. A literal eldritch monster was hunting them and they were still worried about Patrick's feelings, bless. I could tell from the start the monster wanted them to be together and that helped me like it more. <spoiler> until it tried to eat Jag, but until then we were on the same wavelength </spoiler>

There was obviously a ton of metaphor and symbolism going on here with the small town trapping and eating Angelica's future, just like the monster etc etc but I am too tired to fully go into it. And this isn't an analysis, it's a review - so suffice it to say I had a blast reading this, and I want to read more.

I'd heard a lot of excited chatter about this book, so was eagerly anticipating it, and sadly it was not quite what I was expecting - though still an enjoyable read for the most part. Whilst Feast While You Can certainly delivered on the promised sexiness, the horror was lacking, which was disappointing as there was some great tension built up early on in the novel that later fell flat when the ‘creature’ is revealed. The pacing also felt a little off - again, I could have used more tension building, a slower reveal; instead the supernatural presence is revealed, almost everyone is totally onboard straight away, and the rest of the novel is dedicated to figuring out how to stop it, and the build of Jagvi and Angelica’s relationship. Perhaps that is the issue - this is a very relationship focused novel, which was done really well - but the marketing and blurb suggested far more horror than was actually delivered, even almost hinting at a love triangle between Angelica, Jagvi and the demon which (spoiler alert) just isn’t the case - though the actual ‘love triangle’ present was compelling, and not really something I’ve seen depicted before. I also found the lack of specificity in setting - both in terms of time and place - frustrating. Reading an interview with the authors after finishing the book, it seems that this is intentional and meant to ‘unmoor’ the reader. I didn’t really feel unmoored, at least not in the way the authors might have hoped - I just felt a little annoyed, and spent a bit too much brain space trying to figure out the setting (which, it seems, is meant to be Italy, though initially I was convinced it was rural USA - this isn’t a US bias as I’m not American, just the writing tone felt very US-ian at times) or what year it was (vaguely pre-smartphone, but with the occasion quippy asides that feel very 2020's). This also meant in some key scenes I couldn’t quite ‘see’ the picture the writing was trying to paint, giving an unfortunate murkiness to the prose. Ultimately, I did enjoy the book - the bathroom scene at the beginning was chilling, and Jagvi was a fascinating character (more fascinating, I felt, than the protagonist - which the novel seems to agree with) and the relationship was well wrought. While in the end Feast While You Can did leave me feeling just a little, well, hungry for more, I’d still be keen to see what these authors do next.

Feast While You Can is a twisted nightmare of a book.

It thrives on its dark and isolated atmosphere with such a creepy setting, perfectly capturing that sense of push and pull associated with a small hometown. Angelina and Jagvi occupy such different positions around their ideas of Cadenze, influenced by familial relationships and the way they grew up. There is a way the setting almost imprints onto you, particularly in your identity and ideas of the world. It is stifling and achingly real. That sense of desire is tangible

I was drawn to this book based on the central concept: that idea of having your future stolen from you is one that is horrific and yet so human at the same time. We will never know all of the dreams we could have pursued, all the lives we could have lived. Here it is embodied in this monstrous form, but it speaks to a fear that most of us can relate to. The level of horror is great, building from a creeping dread into full-blown grotesque body horror. For me, the pacing was spot on, pulling you into this tangled web and letting you begin it unravel it a little. Eventually we reach the explosive conclusion and even have a great stinger in the epilogue. It is bloody and awful. There is so much manipulation at play and you can never fully trust what is being presented to you. The deeper themes here are rich and presented in such a fascinating way.

Feast While You Can unspools that thread of desire hidden in the depths of your heart and weaves it into a sinister, yet strangely entrancing, story.

This book was the perfect read in the run up to Halloween, it definitely was a monstrous read that kept me hooked.

Urgh YES this book is everything. Horny and creepy and unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Queer horror done RIGHT. More like this please. We are hungry.

I found Feast While You Can easy to get into even though I was unsure where the story was heading, the writing style was easy to follow and kept me interested. Each time I thought I knew what was going to happen next it took a turn and went a different way. I found it such an interesting dynamic with the secrets that were revealed within the family and from Angelina's desires and thoughts. Definitely a good read during spooky season as it was creepy and that ending was so good and unexpected.
A very interesting book about the rawness and scary parts of desire and identity.

Unexpected for a horror novel, but this was a heartwarming (and occasionally heartbreaking) sapphic love story formed in a community that rejects them.

The main character was so complex and layered, but it wasn’t just her I was impressed by. All the characters here, even the ones who have more minor roles in the overall story, felt so complete and equally real - super important for a story that heavily depended on its characters to move it along.

The beast itself could be a metaphor for so many things, but I thought the way it literally devours and feasts on her future was so smart. The beast was extremely critical of her, which again could be a commentary on so many things, but my personal takeaway was that the beast was the combination of her town, her trauma and own insecurities weighing her down and preventing her from being who she could be and from experiencing the joy she could be experiencing. It was beautifully told.

It felt unsettling the whole time I was reading it and at no point could I guess what was going to happen next. The fact you don’t know when or where this is set kinda bugged me at first, but over time I felt like it added to the unsettling feeling. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

Thank you to Netgalley and publishers for the review copy!

Thank you Netgalley, Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta for allowing me to review this digital ARC

A Truly Unputdownable Horror

Feast While You Can is a horror novel that completely consumed me from start to finish. I had no idea where the story was going, and I absolutely loved the suspense of being kept in the dark. The constant guessing—whether I'd be proven right or wrong—made the experience so thrilling, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

Angelina is a fascinating, albeit reckless, character. Her lack of direction and understanding of herself made her feel raw and real, and her relationship with her brother was deeply heartbreaking. He sacrificed so much, especially for Angelina and their mother Carro. Their tangled relationships with Jagvi felt suffocating, and I could really feel the pressure on Patrick and Angelina to be central to Jagvi’s world.

The unpredictability of the monster was incredible, adding a terrifying edge to the plot. The desolate setting perfectly mirrored Angelina’s fractured dreams of her future. Interestingly, I was on holiday in Madeira while reading, so I pictured the story unfolding there, which added a whole new layer to my reading experience. Overall, this book kept pulling me back for more—more revelations, more of Angelina’s chaotic life—and it didn’t disappoint.

This was really wild. I went into this expecting some spooks and smut based on the blurb but this was a lot deeper than that. Identity, family and the idea of home were big themes of the book and I really loved the complex sense of community that was explored.

The characters were very compelling and I found this hard to put down. I really liked how sinister the monster was considering there was no real description of it.

This story surprised me with its deep and dark exploration of family, identity, and queerness. It forces the reader to confront difficult questions in a beautiful but haunting way.

The horror elements of this book were not obvious jump-scares, they were built gradually and created an overarching sense of uncertainty. There was no part of this book that I really expected, and though it did take me a couple of chapters to become hooked, I thoroughly enjoyed this story.

The romance and family relationships in this story were extremely interesting and felt very raw and real. The progression of the story and the pacing does at some points feel slow, but upon reflection I think it creates the perfect atmosphere for the story and helped me understand and root for the characters.

As someone who loves a horror story that at its core is instead and incredibly raw exploration of human experiences, I really enjoyed this book and the experience of reading it.

Thank you to NetGallery and Simon & Schuster UK for allowing me to access this book.

simply DELICIOUS. i am not even a horror gal—in fact i am generally too scared to attempt anything in the genre—but i am a big TVWE fan (and if you are too there is a delightful moment in there for you) and i INHALED this. incredibly sexy and stressful!!! i love a SMALL TOWN, i love a horrible GIRL, i love a complicated family, i love ROMANCE. i ate it up!!!! Sorry For All The Feast Metaphors!!!