British novelist Eliza Clark's first short story collection, She's Always Hungry, is packed with darkly funny, often speculative pieces, each with a hefty punch. In "Build a Body Like Mine," a young woman becomes obsessed with growing parasites in her gut to maintain her goal weight. Women's self-destructive desires take center stage in other pieces, too, while men's hunger for submission is explored in "Goth GF," in which a bartender develops an insatiable infatuation with his sharp-tongued coworker. Finally, in the showstopping titular story, Clark (Boy Parts) builds an entirely new world, a matriarchal fishing society.
Inventive and incendiary, Clark's stories never shirk from the challenges in their content or their broader themes. Make no mistake: they are disturbing. In perhaps the most (wonderfully) unhinged story, "The King," set in a postapocalyptic landscape ruled by apex predators, beheadings, human-flesh eating, and sexual enslavement run amok. But Clark threads this needle carefully, employing dark humor--as when the narrating predator reveals, "For the moment, I work in tech"--that curtails the story's grim content while wryly gesturing to larger societal evils. This tendency to go straight for the irreverent jugular doesn't prevent Clark from capturing tender moments with emotional acuity; in "Nightstalkers," for example, a young man's tentative exploration of his sexuality is particularly sensitively wrought. But it's Clark's ability to attack taboo topics of gender, sexuality, violence, and the power dynamics that intertwine them that makes her collection unmissable. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor