Move over Fifty Shades, there’s a brand new genre whipping the publishing world into a murderous frenzy

 
Ray Wells
2 January 2014

“You will want to vomit.” That could easily have been the subtitle for Season to Taste, the novel — published later this month — that’s currently assuming “the next Fifty Shades of Grey” mantle. Instead, it’s a warning that the protagonist gives herself before she cooks and eats her husband. In fact, perhaps it should be pitched as a sequel to the Fifty Shades trilogy, where Ana finally snaps and turns Leatherface on her BDSM-loving beau. She did talk about Christian Grey-flavoured popsicles, after all.

Natalie Young, who wrote Season to Taste, had what gossip columnists call a “messy divorce”. But rather than sew prawns into her ex’s suits, she dreamed up Lizzie, a fiftysomething who murders her husband, bags the body parts and stores them in the freezer. Young sets out the practicalities of consuming a body and peppers her tale with black humour. There’s even a cannibalistic mantra to rival Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat Pray Love: “Eat shit sleep”.

Young has called the book “utterly disgusting” but adds: “It is very Waitrose: there’s lots of olive oil and salt.” If it does become the ubiquitous novel — the one whose cover you can’t avoid on the Tube — I suggest watching for the grimace on the face of the reader. And having a sick bag handy.

Season to Taste is part of a genre that has been dubbed “chick noir” — a feminist-irking term referring to psychological thrillers marketed at women. Unlike chick lit, there is no happy ending, no wedding dress or pram, just plot twists and tortured souls. Gone are the book covers with pink stilettos, replaced by knives, shattered glass and terrified female faces. These are thrillers thrown into the domestic sphere, tales of intimate betrayal and mistrust. Thanks to the success of Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s best-seller about a cheating husband whose wife has disappeared, these novels now top publishers’ wish lists.

A common theme is the idea that we never really know anyone; that our nearest and dearest may harbour the nastiest and darkest secrets. In You Should Have Known, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel published in March, a therapist, Grace, has written a self-help book telling women to listen to their intuition about their partners; the question is whether Grace has heeded her own advice.

Before We Met, Lucie Whitehouse’s novel, has a similar theme: the perfect husband who may not be so perfect after all. The idea of the enemy indoors both fascinates and disturbs: we wonder if we too could wake up to find that Mr Right is really Mr Psychopathically Wrong.

Sometimes, the apparent baddie isn’t the hubbie, it’s another woman. In Samantha Hayes’s Until You’re Mine, Claudia, who is pregnant, hires a nanny who she then finds snooping in her bedroom. Their story is interwoven with a police investigation into the murder of another pregnant woman. The ending shocks. And In the Lie of You by Jane Lythell, published later this month, it is a co-worker who turns Single White Female.

Will “chick noir” be as successful as Fifty Shades and all its ilk? I think so. For fear of the horror at home must be even greater than the collective desire for whip-wielding billionaires.

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