Cannibalism and body horror are featured prominently in Kayla Cottingham’s second YA novel, This Delicious Death. An incident called the Hollowing has left members of society with a craving for human flesh, but the invention of human-substitute SynFlesh is enough to fulfill their hunger and reintegrate “ghouls” back into society. Teen ghoul friends Zoey, Celeste, Jasmine, and Valeria head to a music festival but when Valeria suddenly goes feral, the girls discover someone is drugging ghouls with the intent of making them feral and must stop it before the festival turns into a full-blown massacre. We spoke with Cottingham about the social taboo of cannibalism, the parallels between her story and the pandemic, and her perspective on book bans as both an author and librarian.
Why was cannibalism the best vehicle for telling this story? Was it always at the center of the book?
The idea behind focusing on characters who are ghouls, who have to eat other people to survive, comes from the fact that cannibalism feels like the ultimate social taboo in our society. One of the things I really wanted to highlight in this book was the way that people who are considered to be outsiders or the “other” by society are put into these categories. That just by living your life you’re seen as a monster by other people. Ghouls are very much a thinly veiled metaphor for queer people and trans people, and also to some degree BIPOC folks who have had to deal with so much shit. By making characters who are literally non-human, I felt that that was a good vehicle to discuss those issues. And that was the main way that I was like, “Oh, cannibalism, perfect.”
What was it like writing about this gruesome disease taking over the world during the real-life pandemic?
The original pitch was just a run-of-the-mill serial killer who showed up at a music festival. But as I was working through the idea, that was right around the time during the pandemic where vaccines had just been approved, and they were going out to society. It felt like this glimmering light of “things are gonna go back to normal.” Like finally, we’re going to be able to stop living in the same amount of fear that we have for the last couple of months. I wound up thinking it could be interesting to talk about how we’ve all been through this huge collective trauma. What do we do in response to that? We’ve all suffered and had these terrible things happen, probably either lost people or know someone who’s lost someone. [It’s this “life is short, let’s party” mentality. Taking agency back. I think that comes from all of that time of just being inside and being scared about what was going to happen. That was ultimately how I wove the pandemic into the narrative, by having it be this semi post-apocalyptic situation.
It also felt like the pandemic opened up this part of legislation where people were sneaking through these laws that were taking away people’s rights and access to health care, and so on and so forth. It made a lot of sense to talk about that in this allegorical form of how the Hollowness can affect anyone, but they all are treated like they are less than human.
Horror often depicts women as the victims of violence, but your novel subverts this concept, as the characters both fear the violence and are the perpetrators of it. Could you talk more about that subversion?
I think of that Lady Gaga quote that’s like, “I don’t support murder, but I do support the empowerment of women.” At one point in the book, Zoey’s reflecting on the change that she’s gone through and becoming Hollow and how she previously felt powerless because she’s always been small and really angry. She’s a kid who feels like she can’t win, like everyone around her is stronger and able to manipulate her. Becoming Hollow and having these cool powers that come along with it, she feels as if she has become the scary thing as opposed to the person who is supposed to be scared. I think women walk around always a little bit aware of the fact that there is a danger in the world for us that is not there for men, particularly cishet white men. It is kind of empowering for the girls to be able to be the monster, as opposed to the thing that is scared of monsters.
Can you share what it’s like to be both an author and a librarian during such high rates of book banning? How does being in both roles offer you different perspectives?
One thing I’ve seen a lot of is people asking authors, “How do we deal with book bans? What is the best way to combat that?” And ultimately, authors aren’t particularly equipped, I think, to answer that question because they aren’t the people who are dealing with book bans directly. They’re not the person in the bookstore, or the library, or the classroom who has to address these bigoted people coming after them. I think being a librarian gives me that different perspective because I know what it’s like to receive a complaint about a book from a patron who has decided to do this false purity approach to library collections. As a librarian, I think the main thing that I can say is make sure that you are supporting your local library. If you know that there’s book banning happening, be the person who raises a stink about it in your community, and post about it on community boards to make sure that the library is getting that support. That’s ultimately what matters the most in the eyes of the powers that be who decide whether or not these book bans are valid.
This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham. Sourcebooks Fire, paper $11.99, Apr. 25 ISBN 978-1-72823-644-5
