Hungerstone – review

Author: Kat Dunn

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: FOR WHAT DO YOU HUNGER . . . ?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them from London to the Peak District, to the remote, imposing Nethershaw estate, where he plans to host a hunting party. Lenore must work to restore the crumbling house and ready it for Henry's guests - their future depends on it.

But as the couple travel through the bleak countryside, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night, Carmilla who stirs up something deep within Lenore. And before long, girls from the local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger . . .

As the day of the hunt draws closer, Lenore begins to unravel, questioning the role she has been playing all these years. Torn between regaining her husband's affection and the cravings Carmilla has awakened, soon Lenore will uncover a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the Peaks and the uncontrolled appetite of the Industrial Revolution, HUNGERSTONE is a compulsive sapphic reworking of CARMILLA, the book that inspired DRACULA: a captivating story of appetite and desire.

The review: Whilst this is a retelling of Carmilla (and I note the blurb mentions it as a sapphic retelling, which forgets that the original – whilst not as direct or graphic as this – was a sapphic tale anyway), it is so subtle around the vampirism that a reader unfamiliar with the original novella or not deeply invested in the vampire megatext may well miss the fact that it is indeed a vampire novel.

And it has a couple of vampiric themes in it, not least that of capitalism as a vampire as the industrial revolution literarily bathes in the blood of the worker to extract the capital. But Carmilla is a vampire and the book connects vampirism with appetite (as well as hunger), which was interesting as Orlok in Eggers’ Nosferatu says “I am an appetite, nothing more.” I am not suggesting there was any read across between the two texts but it was a nice trope, used in both, where the vampire is drawn as having (and offering) a psychological desire to consume as well as a physiological need. Jumping ahead, we only see attacks on Lenore – with sleep paralysis, a (potentially imagined) cat form and, at one point, a blood soaked Carmilla at the end of the bed (mirroring a scene from Le Fanu) but we can read into at least three other women visited by Carmilla (the appetite), which unleashes a hunger that manifests as one eating hair, another eating a live chicken and a third eating flesh from her husband’s arm. The hungers awakened in Lenore are much more complex.

The book moves us from Styria to the Peak District for location (offering an immediately Gothic landscape to play upon), in 1888, but whilst Carmilla still enters their lives through a carriage crash, the reader does not see the crash, rather the aftermath as Lenore and Henry come across it on their journey to the Nethershaw estate. Indeed, the more graphic description of a carriage crash comes in flashback as Lenore recalls the crash that left her orphaned as a child. Lenore is, of course, very different from Laura in the novella – as well as the trauma from her childhood, she is married, sexually active (though she has not during ten years of marriage become pregnant), with Carmilla awakening her bisexuality, and whilst naïve in some respects she is wise in the way of society and etiquette. This brings in other dimensions that Le Fanu could not explore. Her marriage allows for an exploration of misogyny widder than the patriarchal exploration in the original novella.  

I did wonder whether the book was aimed at the YA audience but the themes it explores certainly do not seem to be. However, I very much enjoyed the book, found it a satisfying revisit to Carmilla through an interesting lens. I enjoyed the subtlety of the vampirism and overall think this deserves a strong 7.5 out of 10. I need to add a thank you to Gary who posted about this volume on Facebook, which brought it to my attention.

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK