Woman, Eating was my attempt at getting into the Halloween spirit a bit early. A book about a vampire trying to exist alongside humans without hunting them? As a hardcore Buffy fan, I was intrigued.
Lydia is coming of age as a woman in London, alone for the first time. She was born a vampire and has never consumed human blood, her vampire mother raising her exclusively on pigs’ blood. Not just that, her mother also fed her with a liberal dose of daily shame and repression, always reminding her what a vile, evil creature she is, never deserving happiness.
Lydia’s mother appears to be slipping into dementia and so Lydia checks her into ‘Crimson Acres’ for care, and strikes out on her own to make her mark on the London Art World via an internship.
I mistakenly assumed that Crimson Acres must be a special vampire old-age home but, nope. Lydia’s just somehow hoping no one realises her increasingly unwell mother is a blood sucking fiend. She spends the majority of the novel dodging calls from the care home, and this whole subplot was just so bizarre to me… How on earth could that realistically work?! They would tend to notice if a resident NEVER ATE OR USED THE TOILET in a care home… right? But it’s never mentioned in the multiple scenes of Lydia interacting with Crimson Acre staff. I get that her mother is The Worst but this ‘solution’ of sticking her in an ordinary aged-care home was a perpetual annoyance to me for the whole novel, as it was just so impractical.
So Lydia, free in the world, learns quickly that men are jerks, sex feels good, getting fresh ethically-sourced blood is hard, and the art world is a cruel master. Everything goes fairly poorly for her, and she’s incredibly passive throughout all these hardships. She gets hungrier and hungrier, but seems hopelessly ill-equipped to do anything about it. She wishes she knew the joy of ordinary food, and basically poisons herself experimenting with drinking a glass of milk.
You can probably see where it’s going.
Spoiler alert: once she embraces her inner animal, she gets to experience the joy of eating food via eating humans. Once she’s gone full-dark, there is one throw-away line that she’s going to collect her mother and then strike out (again) into the world, living a properly vampiric life. Which really undercut the whole her-mother-is-the-literal-worst-and-Lydia-can-only-grow-if-she-gets-away-from-her-stifling-presence theme of the book… but I digress.
I really didn’t like this book and will need to go scratch my October Spook Itch elsewhere.
1 maggoty dead duck out of 5.