The vampire will set you free: Hungerstone by Kat Dunn is the feminist horror novel we’ve been starving for

What if the monster you feared most didn’t destroy you—but helped you come back to life? Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is a lush, gripping gothic horror that reimagines the classic vampire tale as a meditation on the pain and power of being a woman in a world that demands your self-erasure. Set against the smog-choked backdrop of the industrial revolution, it’s a story of hunger—emotional, physical, and existential—and what it means to finally stop starving yourself.

At the center of the novel is Lenore, a woman ten years into a crumbling marriage to a powerful steel magnate. Her entire identity has been shaped around being a “good wife,” which, in her case, means tending to her husband’s ego while ignoring her own needs—even as the physical toll of that denial becomes too loud to ignore. She’s in pain but refuses to put herself first. She’s exhausted but doesn’t know how to stop performing. In many ways, Hungerstone is the story of what happens when a woman finally admits that her life is hurting her.

The story begins when Lenore and her husband arrive at a newly purchased estate in Sheffield, where he grew up. On the way there, they come across a wrecked carriage and its lone survivor: a young woman named Carmilla. The doctor insists she must remain at the house to recover from what appears to be a heart condition, but her convalescence stretches on. Carmilla is vibrant in ways Lenore has long forgotten how to be. And with her arrival, something shifts—not just in Lenore, but in the local women who begin to fall ill, consumed by a strange and growing hunger.

The novel leans into its horror roots, but the most terrifying thing in Hungerstone isn’t the mysterious figure who might be draining women’s life force—it’s the social structures that have been doing it all along. Dunn brilliantly blurs the line between supernatural threat and everyday oppression. Is Carmilla a vampire? Maybe. The signs are there, from the nocturnal energy to the cryptic neck wounds. But it’s Lenore’s husband who’s been quietly draining her for years, and it’s Carmilla who helps her wake up.

Dunn also explores the theme of embodiment with striking clarity. Lenore has been taught to suppress her desires, her needs, even her pain. Her identity is all performance—until her body refuses to be ignored. That tension between self-denial and self-reclamation gives the novel its emotional core. What begins as dread morphs into something empowering: an unraveling that becomes a rebirth.

What makes Hungerstone truly special is how it flips the traditional horror narrative on its head. Instead of fearing the thing that threatens her “perfect” life, Lenore comes to realize that her perfect life is the real horror. The thing she’s afraid will ruin her turns out to be the very thing that sets her free.

Yes, there’s a spark of forbidden attraction between Lenore and Carmilla, but that’s just one facet of a much deeper story about awakening—both physical and emotional. At its heart, Hungerstone is about what happens when women stop apologizing for their hunger and start feeding it instead.

Dark, atmospheric, and fiercely feminist, Hungerstone is a novel that lingers. It doesn’t just haunt—it liberates.

Have you read Hungerstone? What did you make of Lenore’s transformation—and who do you think the real monster was? Let’s talk in the comments.

Related Content

• Feminist Short Stories: Horror & Sci-Fi — Spotlight on Five Feminist-Minded Short Stories with Elements of Horror (Exploring Feminisms)
• In her own words: The violence of hunger (Plan International)
• Starving for love: How our attachment style affects our relationships (Esteemology)
• The Gothic horror of Alice Munro: A reckoning with the darkness behind a feminist icon (The Conversation)

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.