What’s more infuriating than a stranger worming their way into your home and your life? How about finding out your husband is poisoning you? And also probably sleeping with your best friend?
I probably requested this book by Kat Dunn from the library after seeing it on someone’s list of their favorite books of the year, but by the time it became available, I had forgotten what it was or why I had requested it. I had been thinking of another book I wanted to listen to, but instead I was all, “Fine! I’ll listen to this one.”
I didn’t get invested until the main character, Lenore, and her husband, Henry, come across an overturned carriage trapping a beautiful young woman named Carmilla.
Then I was all, “Oh, this is a Carmilla retelling? I’m in!”
It’s so good!
Unlike the original, this book takes its time getting to Carmilla, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to say it starts slow, because it dives right into talking about blood. Talk about setting the tone!
First, Lenore is dreaming of blood, only to wake up and find her period has arrived. It’s not exactly a surprise because she and her husband haven’t been intimate for a while, but it is a reminder of her “failure” to provide him with an heir. They tried for years to have a baby, so for all that time the arrival of her period was a disappointment. Now it’s just a mess to clean up.
We soon find out that blood also played a significant role in Lenore’s childhood. She was in a carriage accident that killed both her parents. She survived, but emerged drenched in blood.
Her parents were aristocrats, but the estate had been bleeding money for a while, so by the time her parents died and the debts were paid, she was pretty much penniless. She had no siblings and her dad had been an only child, so she was sent to live with her mom’s sister, a horrible woman who lived shut up in her own house.
The book does a really good job of making you feel sorry for Lenore for having to grow up with someone so devoid of love and sympathy, but without making you hate the aunt. Instead, we come to see the aunt as a pitiful figure with no friends or family. Her only company is this young girl, and she probably doesn’t know how to raise a child because she’s never had to, so of course she does a terrible job.
Lenore’s only way out is to marry well. She doesn’t have money, so she can’t offer a dowry, and even though her sex meant she couldn’t inherit her father’s title, she is still “Lady Lenore”, and that means something in the late Victorian era when the nouveaux riche were still trying to work their way into the upper echelons of a rigid English society.
Sure enough, she marries Henry, a wealthy steel magnate who has the money she needs and is looking to secure the credibility her title can provide.
That was supposed to be her happily ever after. Instead it’s just the prologue to this horror story.
Although she failed to provide an heir, Lenore had thought she had secured her place at Henry’s side at a hunting party when he lost his temper and blew the head off another guest who wouldn’t stop making fun of him for his humble origins. More blood.
So Lenore is surprised to hear her husband say they’re going out to their country estate to host a hunting party. After the disaster at the last hunting party, she had thought their hunting party days were behind them, but apparently that was not the case.
From the outset of their trip things start going wrong. First, there’s the overturned carriage with the poor woman who was ostensibly traveling, but apparently didn’t have any clothes or luggage with her. So, not only does she need to stay with Lenore and Henry while she recovers, but she also needs to borrow Lenore’s clothing.
The house is a crumbling old mansion desperately in need of repairs. Water keeps seeping in everywhere, and although Lenore is in charge of overseeing repairs to the house to make it presentable before their guests arrive for the hunting party, water keeps seeping in over the new wallpaper she has installed. I don’t know if Henry hasn’t authorized structural repairs to the house, so all she can do are cosmetic repairs, or if the decaying house that refuses to stop decaying is just part of the horror.
Since there are only a few usable bedrooms in the house when they arrive, Lenore assumes she’ll be in the room next to the master bedroom and Lenore will be down the hall. Instead, she finds her husband’s things in the room down the hall. Not only does that mean her husband put himself as far away from her as he could, but it means her room shares a door with Carmilla’s room.
If you’ve read Carmilla, you can see where this is going.
Lenore grew up thinking if she was “good” and pleasant and followed the rules, she’d have a good life.
Carmilla isn’t interested in pleasing anyone but herself, and both Lenore and Henry find this baffling at first, then frustrating.
Henry decides pretty quickly he wants Carmilla out of his house, but Lenore goes back and forth between exasperation and intrigue. She’s never met anyone quite like Carmilla before, and while her lack of decorum takes Lenore by surprise, she also tends to ask Lenore questions no one has ever asked before, like “For what do you hunger, Lenore?”
Lenore can’t even answer the question at first because she’s been so brainwashed by decades of society imposing its expectations on her. She wanted to be a good mother, but since that never happened, she just wants to be a good wife and a good hostess. She thinks she’s succeeding, but when she finds out her husband has been poisoning her, she’s as furious as you would expect.
When I read the author’s note and Dunn said she wrote this when she was working through a lot of rage, it made a lot of sense. There’s so much female rage in this book and I was here for it!
If you have read Carmilla, I should warn you the ending of Hungerstone is very different from the ending of Carmilla, but I found it to be a much more satisfying ending.
This book is so well written and absorbing. I think I devoured it in just a few days, and it’s definitely one of the best books — if not the best book — I read in 2025.