I Know I'm Late As Fuck To The Party, But Hunger Pangs By Joy Demorra Is Genuinely SO GOOD
This book breaks ALL the rules and it's still one of the most entertaining things I've read all year!
Hunger Pangs is shamelessly self-indulgent in the very best of ways. There were multiple times where I swear I heard an echo of the author laughing to herself as she wrote.
And I don't know what I should call it, but the closest thing is fanservice I guess? Butter? Whimsy? Well, what ever it is, Hunger Pangs is chockfull of it and here's a non-exhaustive list:
An cunty autistic vampire called Vlad fucking Blutstein
A disabled werewolf beefcake sweetheart
A woman so powerful she could kill you with her pinky (Can I get a Hell Yeah to that?)
the vampire is such a giant fucking nerd like peak blorbo material fucking hell I want to chew on him
somehow slice of life, epic quest to save the world and political intrigue all at once? HOW?
OH and the smut is SCRUMPTIOUS
LIKE THE SOCIAL FUNCTION NOT THE BODY PART
Galadriel doesn't have shit on Ursula, beautiful, ancient, powerful Ursula, I love her, I love her so much, my only complaint is that there was so little of her
HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT
I take back the previous point, there was no on screen hot spring and I am STILL mad about that (in the sequel perhaps? (pretty please?))
Beautiful carnivorous plant children
The universal autistic experience of needing the flirting equivalent of a sledgehammer to the face to be sure what's going on
Political commentary with all the subtlety of Mickey 17, case in point:
"It was all just so frustratingly simple. The government needed to stop levying crippling taxes on the lower classes, they needed to stop waging wars they couldn’t win, and they needed to focus their efforts on relief aid. It was plain as day. They needed to just… do the right thing. The problem was, they just kept choosing to do the wrong thing, over and over, and then they had the audacity to act surprised when the working classes kept finding novel ways to liberate the ruling classes of their heads."
Okay, this list is getting long and I could go on and on and on, but I think we're reaching the point of the review where I put it down and wait for the energy drink to wear off, see you in two hours. Toodles!
Hunger Pangs is an ode to people that refuse to give up their gentleness in face of the world's atrocities and great personal hardship and make a hell of a lot of difference doing so. It's a reminder that even if the world is on fire, there is still love and joy to be found.
Nathan, a werewolf veteran whose decades long deployment ended when he was shot in the shoulder with a silver bullet, should be dead according to all doctors. And he's not alive either, he's just dying very very slowly, poisoned by fragments of the silver bullet no doctor bothered to look for. As a result he's deaf and has lost much of the function of his shoulder. And even after the fragments are removed, while he gets better, he still is disabled.
And where a lesser author would have come up with some magical cure for his illness, made him "whole" again, Demorra gives him hearing aides.
I don't know if Vlad is canonically autistic or if I (auDHD and retired theatre kid) am projecting, but he resonated with me deeply. I've never read anything that got masking so right. His opening of the second ball is a brilliant example of how sometimes, in measured dosages, autistic people can and do enjoy being the centre of attention. Sometimes the line between acting and masking blurs in a way that can be really fucking fun.
I wish we saw more of Ursula in this book. Her tragic background and the responsibility she shoulders must be crushing. What Demorra does brilliantly is contrast her bone-deep fatigue to how much energy and vibrance she can exude.
You can get the ebook on payhip or through your local bookstore. (While I'm very much not the target audience for it, there's also a closed doors version.)
I very much recommend getting it local. For reasons.
OH, before I forget, Demorra is an esteemed hellsite member! You can find her right here, she's a joy to have on your dash: @thebibliosphere
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