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House of Hunger Hardcover – September 27, 2022
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A young woman is drawn into the upper echelons of a society where blood is power in this dark and enthralling Gothic novel from the author of The Year of the Witching.
Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation are all she know. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid.
Though she knows little about the far north—where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service—Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery. At the center of it all is Countess Lisavet.
The countess, who presides over this hedonistic court, is loved and feared in equal measure. She takes a special interest in Marion. Lisavet is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when she discovers that the ancient walls of the House of Hunger hide even older secrets, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse. She’ll need to learn the rules of her new home—and fast—or its halls will soon become her grave.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAce
- Publication dateSeptember 27, 2022
- Dimensions6.22 x 1.04 x 9.27 inches
- ISBN-100593438469
- ISBN-13978-0593438466
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“House of Hunger is gorgeous and lushly dark, a nightmare vision that will pull you into its terrifying grip. Alexis Henderson is a master at creating enthralling fear.” -Simone St. James, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases
“The kind of book that deserves to be devoured. Deliciously brutal, hypnotic, and brimming with ravenous malice, Alexis Henderson has crafted a bloody, sapphic fever dream of a novel and I can’t wait to read it again.”– Francesca May, International Bestselling Author of Wild and Wicked Things
"A gory gem of a story that sinks in its teeth and won’t let up, House of Hunger proves that Alexis Henderson is one of the best Gothic writers out there."–Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf
"With decadent prose as bewitching and as dangerously sharp as a rare gemstone that could slice you open at any moment, Alexis Henderson's House of Hunger is a Gothic masterpiece that demands to linger like the coppery scent of blood in the air long after the final page is turned."-Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
"Readers will devour every page of House of Hunger. Alexis Henderson delivers a chilling, atmospheric tale shrouded in mystery, indulgence, deceit, and dangerous consequences."-N.E. Davenport, author of The Blood Trials
“It’s a lurid, luscious debauch of a book.” – The Guardian (UK)
“Rich with suspense and intrigue, the novel is equal measures addictive and haunting.” – The Independent (UK)
“Breathlessly paced and dripping with gothic decadence, Henderson’s second novel (after The Year of the Witching) cements her status as one of horror’s best new voices.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With sumptuous prose and decadent, Gothic atmosphere, Alexis Henderson spins a lush tale of depravity, sensuality, and horror that kept me on my toes until the bitter end.”-Isabel Cañas, author of The Hacienda
“A beguiling Gothic feast. Every lush, gorgeous page oozes atmosphere and delicious dread. Alexis Henderson is an exhilarating talent, creating rich new worlds that terrify and enchant. House of Hunger is an exceptional work of dark fantasy. Magnificent.” –Rachel Harrison, author of Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
To bleed is to be.
-Vanessa, First Bloodmaid of the House of Hunger
Before she was first bled, when she still had the name her parents gave her, Marion Shaw was a maid at a townhouse in the South of Prane. On that morning-the morning she would later come to identify as the beginning of her second life-she knelt on the hard wood floor of the parlor, sleeves rolled up to her bony elbows, a scrub brush in her hand.
Across the room, in an upholstered armchair, Lady Gertrude sat, watching her work. She was a shrewd woman, blue-eyed with silver hair and a pinched aristocratic nose, spattered with age spots and freckles. While other nobles preferred to leave their maids to their labor, Lady Gertrude preferred instead to preside over them, watching with a falcon's eye as if to ensure that her help earned every penny she paid them.
"You missed a spot," she sneered, seizing her cane to point at a minuscule stain on the floorboards.
Marion batted a dark curl out of her eye. She did what little she could to mind her tone. "I'll be more careful, milady."
"You ought to be. There's girls more handsome and less sluggish than you who'd be happy to have your position," she said, and she bit down on a brittle tea cookie, spitting crumbs when she spoke again. "You've grown slow . . . and lazy. I can see it in your eyes. The little light there was in them has long gone out, and now you expect to drag yourself through my halls on your hands and knees like a common drunk. With your hair unkempt and your apron stained-"
"Rest assured this floor will be spotless by the time I'm through with it," said Marion, cutting her short. She could feel the rage pooling in the pit of her belly like bile. "You have my word."
At this, Lady Gertrude merely frowned, the slack skin of her brow wrinkling like fabric. Marion couldn't help but think that she was rather lonely. Long widowed, without children of her own, or companions or family to speak of, she had no means of social stimulation apart from Sunday mass. Thus, every day she followed Marion from room to room, watching her scrub the floors and polish the silver, sometimes (if her health allowed it) going so far as to trail after her into the kitchens, where she'd remain until her aching knees drove her back to the comfort of her parlor.
Marion polished the floor until she could see her own reflection in it-wide-set eyes gaping back at her, a firm nose and full lips slightly parted, tongue tucked behind her teeth, skin a deep tawny, hair a mess of curls. She frowned at herself just as the church bells rang twelve. With a ragged sigh, Marion peeled her gaze from her own reflection, dropped her scrub brush into the bucket with a splash, and pressed slowly to her feet.
In accordance with the new labor laws, all workers were promised an hour's rest at the top of their seventh hour of work, a precautionary measure enacted after no fewer than six girls worked themselves to death after twenty-hour shifts in a cotton mill. And while Lady Gertrude was not a particularly kind woman, she was a great adherent to order and strict regulation, regardless of whether it was a benefit to her. Thus, when the clock struck noon, she was quick to dismiss Marion.
Unlike many of her set, Lady Gertrude couldn't afford to buy herself a townhome more than a spitting distance from the more . . . unsightly corners of Prane, and it took Marion only a few minutes to reach the cusp of the slums. Here, Marion's pace quickened and she felt her spirits lift, if only slightly.
Gradually, the fine brick townhomes gave way to shanties and warehouses, cast in a pall of smog. Marion shouldered down the crowded streets of the stockyards and adjoining meat market, trudging through half-frozen manure and past the racks of cattle corpses that hung, swinging, by the hooves. Instinctively, she rounded her shoulders against the blast of the coming cold. Fall had only just begun, but it was unseasonably chilly that day and the streets were thick with snow and slush.
Outside, the crowds spread through the stockyards, rounding the corrals where the cattle huddled-shuddering from the cold or the fear of the coming butchery or both. Marion trained her eyes on her boots as she passed them by. Almost ten years of walking every day through the stockyards and she still couldn't bring herself to look those beasts in the eye.
Marion kept walking. The seething smog was low-slung, and so thick that the sun could barely shine through it. The streets were thronged, as they always were at midday. Crowds gathered around the vendor stalls, and if Marion had coin to spare on a bit of roast eel or herring, she might have joined them. But she didn't, so she went about her way, navigating the crowds and icy streets, snow slush leaking into her boots as she walked.
A vicious wind circled down the alleys and ripped at her coat as she neared her favorite place to sit, a dark doorstep at the back of an abandoned warehouse, on the cusp of Prane, overlooking the trenches and the long scar of the northern railroad beyond them.
It began to rain, and Marion retreated into the shadow of the awning, fishing a pack of matches and her last cigarette from the back pocket of her coat. She lit the smoke and nursed it, cupping her hand to shield it from the wind. Between draws she wheezed and shivered, blowing smoke through her fingers to warm them.
The cigarettes did wonders to calm her hunger pangs, and at a halfpenny a pack they were far cheaper than the offerings of the roadside food vendors, who, as far as Marion was concerned, always overcharged.
"If it ain't the jewel of Prane."
Marion turned to see Agnes wading toward her through the thick of the crowds. She raised a hand and Marion greeted her with two raised middle fingers in turn. Agnes was a gaunt, jaundiced matchstick girl with pale brown eyes and thinning hair that she wore in a braid that hung, like a rat's tail, down her back. Like Marion, Agnes had spent the early years of her childhood pickpocketing on busy street corners. In fact, that was how they'd met, and they soon learned that thievery was a trade better suited to two. Agnes would act as the distraction-chatting nonsense with their targets, keeping them occupied-while Marion crept up from behind to nab a coin purse or slip a silk handkerchief from the breast coat of a passing lord. But at age ten, when the legal repercussions of thievery became too steep, Agnes had taken up honest work on the factory line where she made matches-dipping wooden sticks into sulfur-from dawn until dusk. Soon after, Marion secured a position as the scullery maid of Lady Gertrude.
Still, despite their new occupations, every day at noon the two girls made a point to converge at the same street corner where they'd first met. But Marion and Agnes weren't friends, because Marion didn't have friends. The way she saw it, friends were a luxury reserved for people who had the spare time to spend with them-like the girls who wandered Main Street with their parasols and bone-white gloves, retiring to their parlors in the afternoon to take a bit of tea and talk. No. Girls like Marion and Agnes had no use or time for companions. They were simply fixtures in each other's lives, a part of Prane's habitat, like the reeking miasma and the crows and the rats that roamed the streets in packs at night.
Marion passed Agnes the nub of her cigarette and slipped both hands into her skirt pockets, doing what little she could to keep herself warm. She had another five hours of work ahead of her, and it was hard to scrub floors with cold-stiff fingers.
Agnes pulled on her cigarette in silence, the smoke leaking through the gaps of her missing teeth. She looked haggard from the time she'd spent slaving away on the line, breathing the toxic phosphorous fumes day in and day out until the chemical stench filled her up like a second spirit. That was something Marion's mother used to say. That folks in Prane had two souls-one made of the stuff of the heavens, the other from miasma.
Agnes took a final pull on her cigarette and flicked the butt into the trenches. "Ugly day, isn't it?"
Marion shrugged. "No worse than the others."
"But it is. The days are shorter than they ever were before, the nights are longer. And the sun, it doesn't rise as high as it used to. I swear it. The summers aren't as warm. Fall is shorter. The winters are colder." Agnes shook her head. "I can feel the change."
"Prane doesn't change," said Marion, and it was true. Prane was the northernmost city of the South. It existed in the rift between the worlds-the arctic North and the punishing heat of the industrial South. And so, Prane was never one thing or another. In the night, the light of the city was such that it seemed the sun never fully set; in the day, the gray pall of smog made it seem like it never fully rose. Thus, the slums of Prane felt much like a realm caught between, in perpetual indecision, as if the skies couldn't decide what they wanted to be.
Never fully day. Never fully night.
Never anything at all.
And though she knew nothing else, Marion had come to hate that indistinction . . . and most everything else about Prane too. She sometimes wondered if there was a single person in the slums who found something, anything, to love about the place. Agnes, for her part, seemed resigned, even content. But begrudging contentment was not the same as happiness. At best it was familiarity, and at worst defeat. It certainly wasn't the same as true fondness.
Marion lowered herself to the stoop beside Agnes, wincing a little as the snowmelt seeped through her skirts. Her gaze drifted north. In the distance, she could just make out the night train's station on the cusp of Prane-a beautiful structure of glass and iron with its own clock tower that only ever called the hours of the night. Marion had visited the station only once, on her eighth birthday. She had begged her mother to let her see it, in lieu of a proper birthday gift. And so, that evening, they had ventured down to the station.
Marion's mother had lifted her up onto her hip to peer into the night train's windows, and she had caught the briefest glimpse of its cabin-its seats upholstered with red velvet, its windows draped with brocade and dyed silks. Each cabin was lit by the shimmering chandeliers that dangled from the ceilings. They didn't care that the men in the three-piece suits scowled at their presence, or that the women clutched their skirts and coin-fat purses closer at their approach.
Marion and her mother had merely laughed and smiled and watched in awe as the northerners (you could tell them apart from the touring southerners based on their fine clothes and the way they tilted their chins, just so) boarded the train and settled themselves for the journey north. There was a bloodmaid among them, a black-haired girl with a fine mink muff who smiled at Marion through the window. At seven past twelve, Marion and her mother watched from the platform as that great, black-iron beast roared to life and charged into the dark of the night.
Every time she heard the keen peal of the night train's horn, she felt the same stirring in the marrow of her bones that she had as a child, standing on the platform alongside her mother. She loved the sound and the feeling of the train's approach. Sometimes she imagined herself onboard-sitting among the northern nobles and men of Parliament-a gilded, one-way ticket in her pocket that cost more than ten times what a maid like Marion earned in a year.
Agnes eyed her through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Still looking north?"
"Nothing else to look at."
"Then I suppose you won't be wanting this." Agnes reached into the shadows of her coat and withdrew a folded newspaper. She stole one every day, in a kind of unspoken agreement, an important part of their ritual. Agnes brought the stolen paper, and Marion the cigarettes, and together they made the most of what little time they had to spare.
The wind tore at the edges of the newspaper as Agnes opened it and spread it flat across their thighs. They didn't bother with the headline stories-long articles about taxes and tariff wars and cholera outbreaks in the slums. Instead, they skipped to their favorite section, the matrimonial advertisements at the back of the paper.
It was the top of the week, so there was a large selection of adverts to comb through. One for a respectable physician seeking a maiden wife. Another for a widowed cleric with a parish in the country in want of a wife of "impeccable morals" and a mother for his nine children (he requested that the lucky woman be no older than two and twenty). At the bottom corner of the page, an advert for a self-described spinster, aged thirty-eight, seeking a bachelor of fortune to receive with "kindness and affection."
Marion and Agnes read each of these adverts in their best mockery of a posh accent, illustrating the postings with wild imaginings about the appearances of the subjects, their homes and lives and favorite proclivities.
"He might be a fit for you," said Agnes, with a sly smile. She tapped an ad for a navy officer in want of a "wholesome" maiden, and Marion laughed aloud. She was many things, but wholesome she was not. Virtue, in the conventional sense, had never become her. At twenty, she'd shared beds with several women, and she enjoyed indulging readily in the delights of the flesh. She and Agnes had had a brief tryst one summer, but there was no real feeling between them, and things had ended badly. They'd since decided they were better smoking companions than lovers.
Agnes squinted down at the paper. "At a salary of four hundred a year maybe he'd be a fit for me too. I could be a maiden."
"Somehow I have a hard time picturing that," said Marion, turning the newspaper's page. And it was then that she saw it, an advertisement in the midst of the matrimony column. Unlike the other postings, it was printed in the most peculiar shade of scarlet. And the letters were different, larger and filigreed, the dips and curves of each one sweeping into the next like cursive. It read:
Product details
- Publisher : Ace (September 27, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593438469
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593438466
- Item Weight : 1.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.22 x 1.04 x 9.27 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #392,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,854 in Historical Fantasy (Books)
- #5,105 in Dark Fantasy
- #13,830 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft, and cosmic horror. She grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, which instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories.
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A fantastic sapphic story, dripping with opulence, cloying and depraved. Highly recommended!
But what really made me sink my teeth into this novel was that our Marion was not only smart but strong. Reading that she grew up in the slums made me kind of uneasy at first cos you know how it goes, black character living in squalor with a shitty relative and then rising up through the ranks upon earning the favor of rich bloods - thankfully this doesn't last long and Marion makes due with what she has without being written as 'weak' or 'sympathetic'.
Fast forward into the meat and potatoes of this novel and we're introduced to the other characters; the other bloodmaids. All of whom I really enjoyed as characters but wished there was more depth to them - this was more than likely because the book had a pretty brisk pace yet I understood them enough to know what kind of people they were. If you're worried about cat fighting then put them to rest, they exist here but it doesn't last long because - thankfully - all of these characters are mature. It's refreshing to see.
Our Countess is written very well and deceptively warm. You think she'd be this kind of person but she's just as relatable like everyone else, you almost pity her for how aware she is of the deliciously exuberant splendor she's surrounded with. The surroundings and descriptions of what kind of life/time they live in is very beautiful which makes me long to have a show or movie done about this book someday because it's comes across steampunk/gothic fantasy to me, a touch of baroque with improvements of a new age.
Now some had concerns about how quickly paced the ending was and honestly, I don't agree with their thoughts. Without spoiling, let me just say that our characters respond *exactly how a normal human being should respond* in the face of danger. There's no running around without any sense, no mistakes that are so foolishly made that it makes our eyes roll - no. Marion acts EXACTLY how a girl whose survived in the slums would behave and that should be a credit to the author and this book, nothing more.
ANYWHO! Get this book. S'great. You're great for reading this!
KINDA SPOILERISH CRITIQUE STUFF BELOW:
One thing though as we get towards.. 1/3 of the book. Lisavet reveals her entire name and it, at least to me, completely spoiled the book plot for me. If you have any knowledge of vampire lore throughout history then you'll know exactly who I'm referring to and this .. was kind of a bummer, to be honest and the only nitpick I have with the novel. If this family name had been ANYTHING else, I wholeheartedly believe the readers would be left with a delicious mystery up until the very last 1/3 of the book.
Personally, I'm also sick of this woman being mentioned. Yes, I know, Beth was a closeted lesbian tyrant who viciously murdered young women for their youth BUT CAN WE PLEASE PUT HER CRUSTY SOUL TO RESSSST? So many movies, so many songs, so many anime characters inspired by this woman and we can do *so much more* than just make a carbon copy of her.
Despite this, Lisavet was still her own character because there's still shreds of sympathy in this character. Moments of relapse in judgement that really make you believe that she has no other choice but to live in this kind of splendor but I don't think we're given enough time with the characters, again, to really see her beyond the "evil bad" by the end of the book.
The ending was only slightly chaotic to me was because there's only a focus on Marion and Lisavet, with a few familiar faces popping into view but then they absolutely vanish. What happened to them and why weren't that nosy enough to see what became of Marion? If at all, I was surprised how disinterested everyone in the court was to leave them be. As a nosy person myself, I couldn't IMAGINE how a bored spoiled little noble resisted that kind of piping hot tea.
Then there's the "kissing before I stab you in betrayal" trope; I wouldn't have cared that this happened once but this happened twice and at that point - Lisavet, babe, just tell her to finish you off at that point cos that's what you were doing. Their final fight didn't feel as impactful because of this and while I realize these two women have feelings for each other, Lisavet made so many mistakes to the point where it felt she was only cunning for the story to be convenient. It became hard for me to understand what the author wanted for her.
It also would've been nice to see what happened to the other characters. What of Marion's ex-friend? What were the patrons of the House of Hunger doing? Did the servants do anything during this? I would've LOVED an Epilogue for this story.
It could have used another edit for continuity -- at one point, for instance, the protagonist gets a tour of her new mistress's grand home in her underwear, because the author seems to have forgotten that she left her clothes in a wardrobe a few paragraphs ago. There's also an oddity where the "trigger word" for some psychological torture shows up carved all over the furniture ... in a place where the victim shouldn't yet have been aware of her fate. (Who embroidered the phrase on Cecelia's choker?) Great visual, confusing place in the plot.
Main character is LGBTQ+, but it would have been nice to have a healthy wlw relationship in there somewhere so the sapphism didn't feel like just another erotic Gothic trope to go with the incest and the orgies. There are, however, some lovely and satisfying platonic relationships to partially balance the fact that the central "love story" left me cold.
Overall, I'm cautiously interested in reading the author's other book to see if it's better on the worldbuilding and relationship-building fronts, because her imagery has SO much to offer, but this one has been slotted into my memory as "lesbian pulp fiction Crimson Peak with vampires."
🔪 Vampires
🔪 Sapphic
Right from the start, I knew this book was going to become my new obsession. The way the narrative sunk into my soul and held my attention from start to finish. It reminded me of Crimson Peak and I need Guillermo del Toro to adapt this stat.
We have our main character struggling to survive in the slums pushing her to make a bol decision: Become a blood maiden.
She's whisked away into a menacing world that unravels around her as she falls in love with a countess who drinks her blood in search of health.
There's a little bit of mystery threaded throughout the Gothic halls of this tale and for me Alexis Henderson is a must read author.
Top reviews from other countries
To me, the greatest strength of the book lies within Alexis Henderson's writing ability that allows the reader to dive head-on into a fascinating fantasy world in which blood is everything, but the way it is spilled - be it in the miserable slums of Prane or the magnificent halls of the House of Hunger - is even more important; a lesson the protagonist has to learn rather quickly if she is to make it out alive. From the moment Marion enters the House of Hunger, there is a strong sense that something is terribly off about the whole place and its inhabitants; a sense that only gets stronger with every page turned. I have no great experience with reading Gothic Horror and I am fairly easy to scare, but nevertheless I think the author deserves a good deal of credit for her ability to create a tense, unsettling atmosphere that stays with the reader until the finale.
The finale, on the other hand, drags on a little too much for my liking, which is funny because it feels kinda rushed at the same time. I didn't feel like the stakes were that high, nor that the preferable outcome of the story was ever seriously endangered. It's not exactly bad, it just didn't live up to the tension and the suspense of the first three quarters of the novel, which is a little disappointing.
While Henderson's strength lies in creating interesting and atmospheric settings, the intimate relationships between characters fall rather flat at times. There could have been more time spent on developing the characters and their relationships, to give more depth and meaning to the story. This is probably my second biggest gripe with this book. The biggest one is that while the author introduces alot of interesting ideas and, even more so, characters, she does not do enough with them. (You know, Chekhov's gun and stuff.) We get a bunch of intriguing side characters (the Taster, the Rival, the House Mother, the Tutor, the Jester, even the other Bloodmaids) but it seems that in the deciding moments, the author did not really know how to utilized them to drive the narrative forward. (I. e. some characters only show up one time; others are only there to give bits of exposition; interesting details like the chest-high tables that get mentioned several times are never further elaborated on, while questions that would have been benefical for the world building - how does one become a House Mother, or a Taster? What about the political power struggles between the Northern Houses? - are not even asked.)
Overall I think the problems addressed could have been probably solved if the novel had another 100 pages to allow for an even more refined, well rounded story. But the very fact that I would have liked to stay in the world of "The House of Hunger" for another 100 pages is a testament to the fun I had with the book, which is why it gets a solid 4/5 stars and a sincere recommendation from me.
We follow Marion Shaw, a poverty-stricken girl who lives in the slums and has to scrub floors all day just to get by. Her brother is an addict who takes out life’s woes on Marion and uses her hard-earned money to fund his habit. Marion discovers an advertisement for an indenture as a ‘blood maid’ – a revered but feared profession in the north of her world. Bloodmaids demand respect and bleed for their wealthy employers who enjoy blood as a healing tonic and status symbol. Leaving her life behind, Marion follows into this realm of wealth and debauchery hoping to escape poverty and make something of herself.
Life in the House of Hunger is full of luxury, and Henderson’s descriptions of the rooms, the characters, and the atmosphere are stunning. The building itself seems haunting and her cast of characters are deliciously morally grey; they live in a world where servitude is an honour and hierarchy is everything. Countess Lisavet demands loyalty and obedience, with more than a touch of pleasure in the mix. Nothing is quite as it seems and there is mystery and horror weaved into the story that challenges your perceptions at every turn.
House of Hunger has reinvigorated what a vampiric story can be. The word is never used and the lines between the natural and supernatural are blurred to the point that class and status are more important concerns.
A solid 5-star for me, and an easy match to The Year of the Witching in terms of atmosphere and vivid imagery. This would make a fantastic horror film, and I can’t wait to read whatever Alexis Henderson writes next.