Hungerstone by Kat Dunn | Horror Fiction Review

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Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

Released February 2025
Get it at your local library or see more @ Goodreads

I very much loved Hungerstone. It took me ages to finish it but that's my fault. I was reading several other books for various reasons and had to keep putting it down, but I always wanted to grab it first and reading isn't a race anyway. 

It is and it isn't a Carmilla redo. I thought the two were very different (in the best of ways). Carmilla's shadow certainly lingers over quite a bit of Hungerstone but it manages to be its own unique story and I loved that. The author credits Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu but also Coleridge's Christabel, Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations, Keate's Lamia, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as several other texts of historical fiction.

Lenore is married to Henry. He's handsome and wealthy and a genuinely terrible husband and heartless person. Lenore is closed off and protective of herself and she has perfectly good reasons that are revealed as the story gets going. Into their lives crashes Carmilla. Carmilla is ill, the doctor says and must stay in their home while she recovers because she is not fit to travel. Carmilla and Lenore become very close and Lenore begins to open her eyes to Henry's evil ways.

I'm not saying any more about any of that because if you pick up this book you really need to experience it for yourself. And it is an experience. The writing grabbed me and helped me tune out the world every time I picked it up. There isn’t a lot of bitey bitey going on so when gore happens it’s almost a little shocking. Loved that. Dunn does the slow-paced gothic atmosphere perfectly, setting each scene with careful detail. If you're in the mood to fall into a book like this one, I highly recommend it.

Carmilla isn't required reading in order to enjoy this one but I also recommend it if you haven't already had a chance to check it out.

Final Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐


Publisher Plot Synopsis 

Hungerstone is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood and Emilia Hart’s Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.


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