Why You'll Love This
A gothic country manor, a crumbling marriage, and a mysterious stranger named Carmilla — Dunn dares you to look away.
- Great if you want: sapphic gothic romance with real psychological darkness underneath
- The experience: slow, suffocating dread that builds into something genuinely seductive
- The writing: Dunn layers repression and desire with quiet, precise control
- Skip if: you want fast plot over slow atmospheric tension
About This Book
Something is wrong at Nethershaw. Lenore knows it in the cold architecture of her marriage, in the secret she and her husband carry silently between them, and in the way the countryside feels less like an escape than a trap closing shut. When a mysterious stranger arrives — pale, unsettling, and wholly unlike anyone Lenore has ever encountered — the careful distances she has maintained begin to collapse. Kat Dunn's Hungerstone is a gothic sapphic romance that understands desire as both salvation and danger, and it builds its tension around a woman finally confronting what she has been starving herself of.
Dunn writes with an atmosphere that clings — the manor feels genuinely oppressive, the social rituals of the period feel like slow suffocation, and Lenore's interiority is rendered with precision and psychological weight. The pacing resists the obvious, letting dread and longing accumulate in the same breath. Readers who appreciate gothic fiction that earns its darkness rather than simply decorating with it will find Hungerstone particularly rewarding — it uses its genre conventions deliberately, and the result is something that feels both familiar and genuinely unsettling.