Can dead flesh hold anger? Mine would. Mine would be the most excruciatingly bitter of them all.

After hearing so many people rave about Sara's writing, I'm so glad I finally had the chance to check out her work. I went into To Be Devoured with high hopes and solid expectations, and I was not disappointed in the least. It's a tremendously twisted, ridiculously messed up novella about grief, rage, mental illness, and looking for acceptance in a world that often makes us feel out of place — but it's also a disgusting, graphic piece of work that turned even my stomach (which honestly happens very rarely!).

What saccharine horror waits, harbored in the darkness of the woods where the vultures circle?

There isn't much I can say about the plot within these pages without spoiling things, so I'll only tell you that it's a roller coaster worth taking a ride on. I also genuinely appreciated the fact that it's a horror story featuring a lesbian as a main character and it doesn't shy away from the sweet and steamy aspects of her relationship with her partner — that representation is surely something we don't see often enough in the horror genre, and as a fellow queer woman, I enjoyed it a lot (even if that relationship does frequently come to some shocking and dreadful places).

Altogether, To Be Devoured is a story you just can't afford to miss, if you enjoy graphic, hard-hitting horror. It got under my skin in a way most authors and stories aren't capable of doing, and I don't see it crawling back out any time soon.

Content warnings for violence, death, mentions of suicide, mentions of child death, animal abuse and death, body horror,

Spoiler

cannibalism