NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD

Did a miracle weight-loss drug drive one man to cannibalistic murder?

At 5’11” and 323 pounds, 28-year-old Emmett Truesdale is classified as morbidly obese. His struggles with weight date back to his childhood with his loving but permissive mother, his hardworking but violent alcoholic father, and his abusive former stepfather, Hank. He hasn’t had a boyfriend since college and is passed over for promotions at Target. He jumps at the chance to participate in a clinical trial for Obexity, a weight-loss treatment combining a gene therapy procedure with regular doses of the pharmaceutical EmaC-8 (“E. Mack. Eight”) over the objections of his roommate and best friend, Lizette Castillo, herself a proudly fat woman. The surgery is horrifying and surreal, but the treatment is astoundingly effective. Emmett sheds 100 pounds in fewer than four months, and it’s not just his weight that changes. He’s offered a promotion, his crush takes notice, and his “blog of weight loss realness” gains thousands of followers. When Emmett begins experiencing blackouts and waking up covered in blood, and then people who have wronged him start disappearing, it becomes clear that Obexity’s side effects are far from normal—but will he be able to stop taking the drug that’s finally enabled him to be seen by others as a human being? As in his previous novels, A History of Fear (2022) and The Paleontologist (2023), Dumas intersperses his nonlinear timeline with media such as blog posts and interview transcripts to chart his protagonist’s descent into depravity. The novel serves up perceptive commentary on society’s obsession with fat and its treatment of fat bodies, hurtful enough that Emmett considers whether killing and eating people is a livable tradeoff for finally being thin. (As he quips at one point: “The murders didn’t consume his thoughts the way his body did.”) The harrowing depictions of Hank’s abuse are as affecting as the gore, but the novel also has fun despite the serious weight of its premise.

Gory, a touch campy, and superbly well timed for the current cultural moment.