Catherine Chidgey found her spark in a genuine piece of archival weirdness: a 1930s newspaper report of a young woman contracted to fast for 40 days and 40 nights in a Blackpool lion's den, who quit partway through, prompting a wage dispute. Her employer said she'd broken the contract. She said the lion had been set loose. It is, as the review notes, writerly catnip: kitsch, danger, the commodification of female suffering, and a genuinely unresolvable question about who holds power over whose body. Chidgey restages this in a near-future English coastal city where retro attractions have been revived as civic anaesthetic — bingo, blackface minstrels, tearoom cake — while the sea rises and the buildings crumble and the bureaucrats perfect their denial. The tourist board hashtag is #Asimplertime. It's a clean satirical frame, and the central setup is strong: Hazel, newly dumped and carrying a corrosive private shame, takes a job as the Starving Bride, a pretty girl in a wedding dress wasting away in a glass coffin beside a waiting lion. The fiction is that she's saving for her dream wedding. The deal is that she can eat whatever she likes after hours, backstage, as long as she maintains the illusion. Then she decides to make the illusion real. The novel is most alive in its crowd scenes — the mothers and daughters who come to worship at what Hazel's handlers call a 'silent altar of erasure,' who need her suffering to be genuine. The dynamic between performer and audience is sharply observed, and the lion — patient, hungry, watchful — is the book's most effective symbol: appetite that doesn't moralize, doesn't explain itself, just waits. When Hazel's fasting becomes real, the lion grows sleeker and more restless. Chidgey knows exactly what she's doing there. The problem is the cultural moment. Chidgey is working a seam that has been strip-mined. The last decade has produced a genuine glut of what the review rightly calls 'cannibal-lit': Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger, Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh, Han Kang's The Vegetarian. Against that backdrop, The Starving Bride is, in the review's precise word, 'decorous.' It gestures at wildness without committing to it. The lion stays in its corner. The novel's epigraph — 'For our younger selves, who were beautiful already' — signals a therapeutic intention that keeps pulling against the gothic one. The near-future world-building is gauzy where it should be specific. We live, right now, in the era of GLP-1 drugs and looksmaxxing, where the stories told about female bodies have taken genuinely grotesque new forms. Chidgey's near-future feels like it's describing the recent past rather than projecting forward. The satire of climate inaction and extractive nostalgia is stated more than dramatized. And the gender politics, the review notes accurately, are myopic — the novel sees women's relationship to hunger and shame with real clarity, but doesn't extend that clarity outward. None of this makes The Starving Bride a bad novel. Chidgey is a genuine stylist — the prose is controlled and atmospheric, and she has shown in The Axeman's Carnival and Pet that she can go genuinely strange when she commits. This is her holding back. The reader who comes to it without the context of the cannibal-lit wave will find a smart, eerie, beautifully written book with a premise that delivers on its gothic promise in measured doses. The reader who has already eaten Nightbitch and The Vegetarian will feel, accurately, that the bride's coffin is a little too comfortable.
