The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird

A brush with the mushroom devil whets the appetite. The meat at the werewolf’s table is a dish to relish. Dessert with London’s cannibal club may be the cherry on top. From fairy tales and folklore focused on magical foods and strange eating came an enduring tradition of writers playing with food and the uncanny. In the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this tradition thrived, with themes of supernatural consumption, weird transformation and sensual euphoria as key ingredients. Raiding this dark pantry of writing, this new collection presents a feast of sixteen classic tales, two poems and one essay, with choice morsels by masters of the macabre including Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and Roald Dahl. Well, he said, looking at the waiter and giving him a sly wink, all I can tell you is that I think it was pigs meat. You mean youre not sure? One can never be sure. A man is tortured by the lurking fear that he lives among a society of cannibals. Visitors to the hottest restaurant in town discover the arcane origins of its sublime soup. A grooms obsession with the teeth of his betrothed prompts a sickening end to a Gothic romance. The significance of food and eating in storytelling traditions dates back to fairy tales, folklore and beyond, with the capacity for the edible to transform or to cause otherworldly effects sometimes inspiring wonder, but often touching on a deep-rooted fear. Exploring themes of body horror, consumption and myriad forms of strange eating, this new collection includes a feast of bitesize tales from masters of the macabre such as Shirley Jackson and Roald Dahl alongside lesser-known oddities from the British Librarys collections to digest the significance of the uncanny gastronomic.