‘A Certain Hunger,’ by Chelsea G. Summers book review

The narrator and main character of “A Certain Hunger” is a sexy food critic named Dorothy Daniels. When the novel opens she’s sitting alone at the bar of the NoMad Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an Absinthe cocktail called The Corpse Reviver #2 — “an exquisite drink that sits on the lintel of anarchy.” Dorothy, who’s a preternaturally hot babe of 51, is there to pick up a bed partner. Soon enough, a likely young man named Casimir sends over a drink and “slid[es] off his chair, smooth as a pat of butter oozing from a pile of hot flapjacks.” Before long the pair are ensconced in his hotel room, doing the horizontal hula. They meet up frequently after that, until the night that Dorothy plunges an ice pick into Casimir’s throat and — how shall I say this politely? — indulges in her secret hunger for organ meats.

I warned you that you might be grossed out.

“A Certain Hunger” would be an immediate turnoff (this scene with Casimir takes place in the opening chapter of the novel) were it not for Summers’s romping way with words. Dorothy speaks like Humbert Humbert and behaves like Hannibal Lecter. It’s that Humbert-like voice — the flair for fresh imagery, ornate vocabulary and sly humor — that lures readers into this vile debut novel. For instance, here’s one of Dorothy’s more philosophical musings as she’s sipping her cocktail in the hotel bar: “Hotels are like train travel, like early- morning pillow talk with a stranger. They allow you to occupy a space that’s caught in indefiniteness.” Or consider Dorothy’s boastings about how she avoided getting a “bad rep” while sleeping around in college:

“You’d think that having sex with . . . many young men — a group whose predilection for gossip makes retired Mahjong players look like Cistercian monks — I’d get a bad reputation. But I’d been careful . . . I didn’t [sleep with] anyone I couldn’t ruin. My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man. ”

I’ve had to clean up Dorothy’s language because she can be rather raw. Summers’s author bio identifies her as “a columnist for the now defunct ADULT magazine;” clearly her background as a writer of erotica comes in handy here in devising the acrobatic array of cartilage snapping couplings that Dorothy enjoys with an international menu of men, among them: the aforementioned Casimir, a Russian; Andrew, an American; and Giovanni, an Italian. Tasty beefcake all.

In classic noir suspense style, Dorothy retrospectively narrates her career as a libertine, food critic, murderer and recreational cannibal from prison, so we readers know from the outset that she’s not able to skip out on the karmic dinner bill, so to speak. But another thing that makes Dorothy so likable — despite her grotesque cravings — is that she’s not a complainer. She cheerfully assures us: “It’s not as dangerous as I thought it would be, prison. . . . Just after I first arrive, two women — what do they say — got all up in my face. It was kind of adorable, really. . . . They cornered me as I was exiting the shower; I looked down at them . . . and told them that I’d killed a man with a piece of fruit. I let that assertion sit, and I saw their limited wonder about their own personal and painful Achilles heels.”

During prison visiting hours, Dorothy entertains a parade of psychology and criminal justice students who want to interview her for their doctoral dissertations. (“It was delightful to be so avidly courted by so many keenly interested young things. I felt like the belle of the carceral ball.”) Dorothy toys with them, as she does with us, laying the seductive sauciness on thick as she reminisces about her distant parents, her lucky break into restaurant reviewing, her sexual initiation in the slick arms of a teenage fry-cook, and the amoral curiosity that pushed her over the ultimate culinary line. The suspense of “A Certain Hunger” derives from watching how Dorothy concocts and then, for a time, gets away with, ever more elaborate — and sometimes hilarious — methods of murdering her victims so that their deaths look natural (despite the odd missing liver or rump).

“A Certain Hunger” is distasteful, but it’s also naughty, witty and inventive. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth, but — unlike the slew of “Gone Girl” knockoffs that clog the offerings of suspense fiction these days — it won’t bore you.

Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

Unnamed Press. 237 pp. $26