A review by bluejayreads
House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

3.0

I have been dealing with some serious brain fog lately. This is the first book I’ve actually managed to finish in almost two weeks. It’s been hard to focus on reading anything, and that has definitely affected my reading experience. So there is a definite grain of salt to be added to the following opinions. 

This book went hard on the dark and disturbing Gothic vibes, leaning into the pleasure in pain, debauchery, and hedonism of a wealthy blood-drinking court. But that’s about all there is to this book – vibes. There’s nothing deeper or richer than that. 

The world is in general badly explained. Stuff like the political interactions of major and minor noble houses gets info-dumped, even though none of it matters and only one character from a house besides the House of Hunger is at all relevant. Stuff that actually was interesting and relevant to world-building and the overall atmosphere were completely glossed over. For example, a few sentences towards the beginning indicate that the north part of the world may be some sort of different realm or fae dimension that somehow connected to the ordinary world, but that is never explained or even confirmed. 

The biggest drawback was the characters had absolutely no motivation. They do things for no discernable reason and stop doing them for no discernable reason, and nobody seems to think that people could have reasons. Nobody has desires or reasons to act. Marion, the protagonist, states some motivations and desires, but she doesn’t act like she has any. At one point, she decides on a course of action because the plot said so and practically says as much. I can’t even call the characters flat because they have to have at least one dimension for that. Most of the characters were bland pretty girls in pretty dresses drifting through a gothic mansion at the whims of the author. 

This book is a strange reading experience because I 100% get what it’s going for. I intellectually know it’s going for a dark, creepy, gothic feeling, dripping with blood and sex and debauchery and hedonism. In my head I know that’s the picture that it’s trying to paint. But it stays in my head. There’s no feeling to it. The strange pacing probably helped with that, spending over half on setup that skipped over months at a time and then slamming directly to climax with hardly any middle to develop an actual story. Maybe it’s because of my brain fog, or maybe because the characters felt so lifeless. But it was all tell and no show. There were definite vibes, but no mood or atmosphere whatsoever. 

I think I finished reading this book because I wanted a dark and atmospheric gothic fantasy horror. I expected something rich, lush, and atmospheric, with blood and silk and sex and horror blending into a velvet tapestry of violent delights, and kept reading hoping it would show up eventually. But what I actually got was the LaCroix of gothic novels – hints of flavor enough to tell what it’s supposed to be, but nowhere close to real or satisfying. 
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