The fiercest, most powerful novel of 2025. For what do you hunger . . .?Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them from London to Sheffield, and with his success hinged on a hunt, an old tradition looms over the home; the hunt is a time to settle old scores. If a bullet finds a human home, then it is only that they were foolish to become prey. In the weeks leading up to the hunt, a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night, Carmilla who will not eat meals with the family, Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a terrible hunger . . .Set against the violent wilderness of the Peaks and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution HUNGERSTONE is a compulsive feminist reworking of CARMILLA, the book that inspired a captivating story of appetite and desire.
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I really debated between rounding up or down, but after some consideration, I'm going to have to round down.
The story itself was enjoyable enough, but the two things that it suffers from is the fact that there are a lot of unnecessary flashbacks, as well as the fact that the book's pacing is way too slow for what it actually is. These two issues directly relate to one another.
The main character who we are getting flashbacks for only really ever has two things that she talks about - her traumatic childhood / living with her aunt, and how she grew up and thought she was doing well by finding a husband to marry. The flashbacks were fun at first, but get very repetitive very quickly. At least a good 20 pages could be shaved off of this book with no considerable loss to the story.
In fact, I feel like these flashbacks at a certain point only work to drag down the pacing of the story. I know that part of their purpose is to put you into the mind of the main character and her despair and descent into self-doubt and loathing, but that only really works if the flashbacks are actually providing something new and fresh to the plot. Most of the time, it simply re-iterates what we already know but through a slightly different event.
This, in turn, makes the first 56% or so of the book very repetitive and slow, and things really only start gaining steam after this point. Where the first half was at first interesting but eventually turned slog, it becomes really riveting after the halfway point.
Although I am pleased with the conclusion of the story, I still felt the relationship between our main character Lenore and the mysterious stranger Carmilla to be lacking. Or rather, I expected something a little more from it based off of the description. Throughout the book, these two actually have a surprising lack of interactions, because Lenore is either purposefully avoiding her, or Carmilla sometimes has a habit of just disappearing for a day or two before returning back to Lenore's residence. I expected their clash of personalities to be a little bit... more than what it was. To me, I can't say much more about the pair except that Lenore is bewitched by her. I didn't see much more to their relationship besides that. I would go so far as to say that Carmilla herself ends up falling into the typical tropes of a manic pixie dream girl, though I know that was not the intention, but now that I've made that connection in my head I can't seem to shake it.
I had an easy enough time imagining everything that was going on since Kat Dunn certainly knows how to write a vivid description, but in the aspects of pacing and character development, it's a little rough around the edges. I would be interested in reading more from her in the future, but this one fell just a little below target for me.
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