#This delicious death

[theartistichuman]

this may be controversial but it has been stewing in my brain for literal years, but required cannibalism (cant survive without eating flesh of the self) is much more interesting as a disability metaphor than a sexuality metaphor

[fortunatefires]

Last day of the trans rights readathon and I wanted to share my reads

[autumnsaesthetics]

🎃 Horror Books For Halloween 🎃

Part One!

(Row One) 🎃

The Honeys by Ryan La Sala

We Don't Swim Here by Vincent Tirado

This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham

(Row Two) 🎃

She Is A Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

The Haunting Of Alejandra by V. Castro

(Row Three) 🎃

The Getaway by Lamar Giles

Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

House Of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

Afraid I must report that this TBR stack has only gotten taller since I took this picture 😅

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham

goodreads

Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin into the atmosphere, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation that became known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. Those who went without flesh quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy the hunger of those impacted by the Hollowing. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they'd pejoratively dubbed ghouls. Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. They have a cooler filled with hard seltzers and SynFlesh and are ready to party. But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can't figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe.

Mod opinion: I haven't read this book yet, but I really want to, it sounds interesting.

[limayde]

57. This Delicious Death (Kayla Cottingham)

The lady at the bookstore I frequent came up to me one day and said "I have the perfect book for you." She was right, this was in fact, the perfect book for me, and also my partner who was eating it up the whole way through. TDD has one of the coolest takes on zombies I've ever seen, even now, when the genre has exhausted almost all unique and interesting ideas, Kayla comes in and has one of the best fucking ideas to freshen up the genre. That tagline also has a double meaning, because the entire main cast is comprised of queer women. The MC is bi and has a crush on her trans friend who she's known since childhood. She's just a giant ball of gay panic and it's so funny. Also ghouls (this book's term for zombies) are 100% an allegory for queer folk and the way society treats them. If you plan on reading it yourself, there is a huge laundry list of content warnings you might wanna look over, just in case there's something you're not comfortable with!

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

This Delicious Death

YA horror/comedy

3 years ago an illness turned part of the population into ghouls. But with the development of synthetic human flesh, they’re able to go back into society & live life as normal

a girl & her three best friends go to a music festival, their first big trip on their own since becoming ghouls

but when one of them goes feral and people start dying, they have to figure out who’s drugging ghouls to keep themselves and everyone else safe

bi girl x bi trans girl

[purple-dragon]

last week i read this delicious death, by kayla cottingham, and i really enjoyed it overall, but there was one specific aspect that i loved and want to talk about a little more. spoilers below:

this delicious death is a book that i would describe as tokyo ghoul-esque in nature with regards to the content. you have your protagonists, four teenage girls who, during a worldwide apocalyptic event, were turned hollow (ghouls, pejorative) and must now consume human flesh to survive. though there is synthetic flesh available to them, the stigma of being a 'ghoul' is still present and affects their daily lives, to the point where when they go to a music festival, they and their fellow ghouls start getting drugged with a substance that makes them go feral and kill people, increasing the public's fear and distrust of ghouls in general.

it's a great concept, in my opinion. part murder mystery, part social criticism, part romance (best friends to lovers and the li is a trans woman? i love it i love her), and all around good time. it's genuinely so fun fr fr !!

but the part that i personally liked the most was the way that the author allowed the characters to keep their humanity. the four main girls have a choice at the end to either kill/leave for dead or save the person who (though coerced and manipulated) caused all of the problems and hurt/killed a lot of people, and they choose to save him.

it's not that they even like him at this point - he's hurt all of them, and they owe him nothing. but they empathize with him, because he's doing all this out of being manipulated and sheer guilt about what he did during the hollowing, and they understand, because they also did horrible, reprehensible things during the hollowing. they understand how he feels, and they don't condemn him for it.

it would have been very easy to make them the type of characters who would leave him for dead. the type of hard, cold, girlboss no mercy type of character that i see so often in ya/na novels nowadays. they could have left him, but they chose not to, and that's what's been hitting me.

that moment, i feel, is what made them the most human of all the characters, even despite the fact that they're ghouls, and that's the choice that made this book go from good to great for me.

[kore-queen-of-hades]

I read This Delicious Death in one day and it now lives rent free in my head

Please PLEASE READ THIS BOOK!!!!

I desperately need to talk about this book!!

[foreverbeautifulbooksandcomics]

[the-final-sentence]

And the future was ours.

Kayla Cottingham, from This Delicious Death

[bookcoversonly]

Title: This Delicious Death | Author: Kayla Cottingham | Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire (2023)

[brightbeautifulthings]

This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham

"I remember once seeing a piece of art that said the people you love become ghosts inside of you. What I realized now was that it was true of the people you killed too."

Year Read: 2023

Rating: 3/5

About: Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls, affected by the pathogen released three years ago that gave some of the population a hunger for human flesh in an event known as the Hollowing. Ghouls who don't eat will quickly turn feral, but there's a synthetic alternative called SynFlesh to keep ghouls and humans living peacefully together. The girls are headed to a music festival in the desert, but when Val goes feral the first night and kills someone, the others will have to race to figure out who's drugging ghouls to make them lose control. Trigger warnings: character death, gore, body horror, drugging, sexism.

Thoughts: I don't have any real complaints about this, and had I still been the target teen audience, I think I would have loved having some girl-centric zombie content. The female/wlw/trans/poc representation are much-needed additions to the horror genre, which tends to be overwhelmingly none of those things. The main characters are likable enough, and I enjoyed the solid friendships among the four of them. They'll literally fight monsters, the patriarchy, and themselves (from, y'know, becoming monsters) for each other, and it's a powerful message.

I also enjoyed Cottingham's zombie lore quite a bit. The flashbacks to the outbreak slow down the pace a bit, and I wasn't as interested in that timeline as I was in the current one, but they provide some interesting insight into the girls' transformations. It's cool to see how the world has adapted to the Hollowing but obviously still retains some prejudices. The setting is a full-on music festival mood, complete with an over-abundance of rock 'n roll fuckboys. It's fun, gory, and relevant to the contemporary world of social influencing and tracking our every move online, if not something I'm likely to reach for again.

[cococastiel67]

"Maybe you can be my home. And I can be yours."

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

I truly had no self control at the bookstore last weekend 🙈

[oracleofmadness]

This is a delicious treat of a horror book! A full course meal that left me completely satisfied! I love new takes on the zombies and monsters of horror any day, but this is going down as a favorite.

Zoey and her friends are ghouls. They are a part of the Hollow People that make up a section of the world's population now. Ghouls become gaunt, a bit elongated, with claws and vicious fangs and require human meat to live on. That's why Zoey and the girls are taking a nice big cooler of Synflesh with them to a desert music festival. However, it's not a fun festival for long.

I loved this so much! It really made me laugh while being creepy and gory, which is a difficult task.

Content warnings for gore, violence, death, and mention of deadnaming.

Out April 25, 2023!