Female cannibals: What’s behind the emerging horror fiction trend?

There’s a new trend in horror fiction: the female cannibal. In Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part (2025), a college student eats the eyeballs of the men who fetishise her. In Delilah S Dawson’s Bloom (2023), the love interest, who appears to be living a fantasy version of cottage life, is actually including body parts in her organic homemade goods. In Chelsea G Summers’ novel A Certain Hunger (2021), a remorseless food critic cooks her lovers.

You can find cannibals in three more novels published last year alone: Lucy Rose’s literary folk horror sensation The Lamb, Olivie Blake’s Girl Dinner and Catherine Dang’s What Hunger. They follow Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty (2023), Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings (2020) and many more.

Cannibalism is not a new theme in horror, of course. There is Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, people as food in Solyent Green – and last year’s hit Apple series, Pluribus.

Feminist cannibals

But the new wave of cannibal novels is written by women. These books feature man-eaters who are gory, graphic and distinctly feminist. The female cannibal has become a radical figure who satisfies her cravings. These are stories about women who are violent, angry and resistant.

Horror thrives in times of anxiety. Renowned authors, such as Ann Radcliffe in the late 18th century, Charlotte Perkins...

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