A new trend is emerging in horror fiction: the female cannibal. In Monika Kim's The Eyes are the Best Part (2025), a college student consumes the eyeballs of men who fetishise her. Delilah S. Dawson's Bloom (2023) features a love interest who incorporates body parts into her organic homemade goods. Chelsea G. Summers' novel A Certain Hunger (2021) follows a remorseless food critic who cooks her lovers. Three more novels published last year alone—Lucy Rose's The Lamb, Olivie Blake's Girl Dinner, and Catherine Dang's What Hunger—also feature cannibals. They follow Ling Ling Huang's Natural Beauty (2023), Sayaka Murata's Earthlings (2020), and many more.
A New Wave of Feminist Horror
Cannibalism is not new to horror, with examples like Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and the recent Apple series Pluribus. However, the new wave of cannibal novels is written by women, featuring man-eaters who are gory, graphic, and distinctly feminist. The female cannibal has become a radical figure who satisfies her cravings. These stories are about women who are violent, angry, and resistant.
Horror thrives in times of anxiety. Renowned authors like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Shirley Jackson have explored themes of isolation, domestic abuse, and patriarchy through horror. Literary scholar Jennifer Brown asserts that the cannibal “reflects and embodies fears of specific times and spaces.” Contemporary feminist horror novels also encourage deeper questions. In A Certain Hunger, protagonist Dorothy turns her male lovers into gourmet meals while lamenting double standards in patriarchal America. Ji-won in The Eyes are the Best Part consumes the male gaze by eating the eyeballs of her mother's leering boyfriend.
Beyond Self-Defence and Vengeance
These female cannibals are not just committing crimes of self-defence or vengeance. They enjoy the hunt, the kill, and the meal. They are literal man-eaters, pushing the boundaries of traditional femininity. They are not thinking about weight gain or calorie intake; they relish their food and become more powerful. The female cannibal feasts, gorges, and unapologetically takes pleasure in her gruesome banquet. She takes up space as a powerful victim turned villain.
In The Eyes are the Best Part, the Korean-American protagonist exploits harmful stereotypes about Asian women to avoid suspicion. “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?” The novel provides food for thought about expected norms, performative activism, and white male entitlement.
Cannibals and Body Anxiety
Our society assumes 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? Gender theorist Brian Pronger's Body Fascism (2002) describes the allure of imitating body standards shown on screens. To fit in is to be desirable; to be desirable is to be safe. Striving for the “ideal” woman is a political decision often unconscious. Sociologist Kass Gibson notes that body fascism “links idealised body shapes … with notions of morally praiseworthy and responsible citizenship.”
These new cannibal novels rage against these pressures. In Kim's book, the Asian protagonist seethes against her mother's racist, domineering boyfriend but craves his blue eyeballs, leading to 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. In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's 2020 bestseller Mexican Gothic, colonisers consume the bodies of their subjects. In the face of societal pressure to shrink themselves, these women writers enact fantasies of dominance and control, or use 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 unrealistic body standards back in fashion with the rise of Ozempic and decline of body positivity. It also demonstrates a willingness to defy it.
