This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham
Four best friends, one music festival, and a cooler filled with human organs: this summer is about to get gory.
Jennifer’s Body fans will clamor for this new sapphic horror standalone from New York Times bestselling author Kayla Cottingham.
Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin into the atmosphere, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation that became known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. Those who went without flesh quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy the hunger of those impacted by the Hollowing. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they’d pejoratively dubbed ghouls.
Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. They have a cooler filled with hard seltzers and SynFlesh and are ready to party.
But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can’t figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe.
This was a quick, fun read. There were definitely things that annoyed me, but I mostly enjoyed it.
The description saying fans of Jennifer’s Body will like this is pretty accurate. There were some similarities. The ghouls in the book look normal most of the time. It’s only when they want to eat that they change. Their jaws stretch out, they get more sharper teeth, and they get claws. Luckily there is now synthetic made organs for them to eat, but when they first turned, a lot of people were killed and eaten. The four girls go on a road trip to a music festival in the desert. There are no cities for fifty miles, so they’re really out in the middle of nowhere with no help when things go wrong. When Val goes feral one night and kills a boy, the others help her hide the body and try to find out what caused the change in her. More people are missing and they find an abandoned lab with ghouls that are different. They’re more deformed and don’t seem to be human any more. Someone out there is making these ghouls on purpose with a toxin and they need to stop it from happening more.
I gave this book 4 stars. It might have been a bit closer to 3 1/2, but I gave it 4 since I just wanted to read something fun. And this one fit that.
Have you read this? Is it on your TBR?
