Whether you find this novel entertaining or excruciating may be up to your appetite for gore—and hyperbole.
A horrific cautionary tale about a group of friends in Rio de Janeiro who collaborate on an unusual startup.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that the secret behind this book’s title is the consumption of human flesh—that’s given away in the opening anecdote, which involves the phrase “seagull meat.” The question isn’t about whether or not longtime friends Dante, Piglet, Miguel, and Hugo (along with Piglet’s sex worker-turned-girlfriend, Cora) will serve a “secret dinner” to monied guests, but how they’ll carry it out. Piglet is the IT genius, Miguel a medical resident, Hugo a top-flight chef, and Dante the administrator. And Cora? She grew up on a cattle ranch, so she does the butchering, complete with a canary-yellow chainsaw. No sooner have these cash-poor pals earned enough to pay months of back rent than they are contacted by the well-connected and somewhat seedy Umberto, who urges them to put on three dinners a week; he’ll take care of the guest lists. As the money rolls in, some members of the group find their stomachs aren’t strong enough for the ramped-up process. Miguel worries that hospital authorities will pin the initial body snatch on him, while Dante holds out for a long time against trying the "seagull meat." Author Montes inserts several conversations and passages about why cannibalism is no different from eating the meat of other animals: “We all live on a hypocritical diet, soothed by whatever tastes good. We feel sorry for the little piggies and baby cows, but we love a nice, juicy steak.” While that’s food (ahem) for thought, these moments of gastronomical philosophizing lose steam juxtaposed against a scene like the final dinner, a mashup of the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones with Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Forgive the screen references, but that scene and others feel specifically written for screen adaptation, filled with ghoulish detail that don’t enhance the plot. One of the more successful devices that threads the beginning to the end has to do with one character’s trauma and how that can change a personality. Combined with the overall quick pacing and introduction of twists (some of them red herrings), that device will help the book find readers who will gobble it up.
Whether you find this novel entertaining or excruciating may be up to your appetite for gore—and hyperbole.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781250442413
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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