A weight-loss miracle with teeth, and a culture that built the trap.
Emmett Truesdale trained to teach and ended up folding shirts at Target, and Luke Dumas builds Nothing Tastes as Good in that gap between the life he earned and the body the world keeps punishing him for. This is body horror with a heart, a novel about a weight-loss drug that works too well and the cannibal cravings that come bundled with the miracle. Dumas takes the Ozempic moment, fatphobia, and diet culture and feeds them through a story that is funny, furious, and genuinely upsetting.
Nothing Tastes as Good | Luke Dumas | Atria Books
Dumas makes the miracle feel earned before he ever shows you the bill. A body-horror confession with teeth, where the gross-out feels like grief and the satire keeps its villain in plain sight. The cruelty is not that Emmett learns to consume people. It is that he had to become a monster before anyone would treat him like a man.
Emmett Truesdale did the work. He has the teaching degree, the certificate, the whole future drawn up in his head, and instead he folds graphic tees at a San Diego Target while strangers glance at his body and quietly file him under problem-to-be-solved. That gap, between the life he earned and the one his size keeps handing him, is where Luke Dumas builds his third novel. It turns out to be a meaner, sadder, and much funnier place than the cannibal logline lets on.
The back cover undersells. Nothing Tastes as Good takes its sweet time, and I mean that as a compliment. Dumas refuses to sprint Emmett toward the gore. He sits you down in the small humiliations first. The seatbelt that won’t quite click. The job interview that goes nowhere.
The mother who never once called her son fat and somehow made the whole thing worse by feeding him while she starved herself. By the time Emmett enrolls in the Obexity trial, you already ache for the guy. So when the pounds start falling off at a speed no human body should manage, the relief lands on you too. That is the trap. Dumas makes the miracle feel earned before he ever shows you the invoice.
The dread builds slow and low, the way real hunger does. First it is just blackouts. Lost afternoons. A little blood on the carpet that Emmett would rather not explain. Then people who were cruel to him start to go missing, the local news starts using the word cannibal, and Emmett does the arithmetic the rest of us have already done and tries very hard not to. What sells it is that he does not want to stop.
Why would he? For the first time in his life, the world is being kind to him. People hold doors. People flirt. The drug is eating something in him, and the trade feels almost reasonable, and that quiet reasonableness is the scariest move in the book.
Two voices run the whole thing, and the way Dumas splits them is the smartest craft decision here. The third-person chapters sit right up against Emmett, close enough to feel his shame as body temperature. Then the first-person sections arrive as Instagram captions, blog posts, emails, the public face he builds for an audience. Usually first person is the intimate register, the one that hands you a character’s bare insides.
Dumas flips it. In this book the first person is the mask, the performance, the curated version Emmett wants liked and followed and believed. You end up knowing him in two contradictory ways at once: what he feels, and what he needs you to think he feels. The distance between those two is the real horror engine.
His prose carries it without strain. The chapters are short and shaped like scenes, cut and reset to a new location the way a film moves, which keeps the pages turning even through the quiet stretches. And the man can write food. Lord, the food. Gas-station hot dogs, fast-food bags, the cheap stuff that glows on the page like treasure because Emmett needs it to.
Reading Dumas on a binge is like reading a love letter written in grease: smudged, a little ashamed of itself, and far more honest than the writer meant it to be. That is the one image I keep coming back to, because it is exactly how the book feels in the hand. Tender and a bit greasy and impossible to look away from.
Strip the plot back and ask what this book is actually about, and the answer is shame. Not the drug, not the murders, the shame underneath all of it. Emmett has been told his whole life that his body is a moral failing, a thing to apologise for, and Dumas traces how that message gets force-fed until it becomes identity.
The cannibalism reads as metaphor doing heavy lifting and doing it well. A man told for thirty years that he consumes too much, that he should take up less room, that he is greedy for simply existing, finally starts consuming on his own terms. It is rage with a knife and fork. It is power, finally, taken rather than begged for. And the cruel genius of it is that the appetite still does not fill the hole, because the hole was never really about food.
The satire has fangs too, and Dumas keeps it in plain sight. The company is called Monstera. The drug is EmaC-8, say it out loud. He puts the villain’s name right on the label and bets, correctly, that a culture trained to see fat people as the monsters will look straight past it.
There is a real argument buried in the genre fun: we built a frantic market for these treatments by telling people they are defective, then we sneer at the same people for using the treatments we sold them. The book lands in the middle of the Ozempic moment without ever feeling like a hot take. It feels lived in, because Dumas has lived a version of it, and you can sense that authenticity in how carefully he refuses to make Emmett a saint or a simple victim.
This is body horror married to social horror, and it knows its lineage. Dumas has named King’s Thinner as the seed, the dramatic-weight-loss concept that hooked him at thirteen, and the debt is affectionate rather than derivative. If you want company for it, reach for Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh for the way an entire society agrees to look away from what it eats, or Rachel Harrison‘s work for that blend of real emotional bruising and genuine fright.
What sets Nothing Tastes as Good apart from its neighbours is the interiority. Plenty of horror novels will gross you out. Far fewer make the gross-out feel like grief. Dumas gets both, and he gets them in the same sentence, which is rarer than it sounds.
Horror has always been the best tool we have for talking about the body and the systems that police it, and Dumas points that tool straight at the most anxious conversation we are currently having about ourselves. He does it with empathy, with jokes, with an extended Pokémon bit. He never lets the cleverness crowd out the hurt. That balance is hard. He makes it look like instinct.
The cruellest trick is not that the drug turns Emmett into something monstrous. It is that he had to become a monster before the people around him would finally treat him like a man.
‘A staggeringly honest exploration of how shame, cruelty and the hunger for acceptance can make us feel sub-human. Visceral and vicious, horrifying, unflinching and unputdownable’ RACHEL HARRISON
You’d kill to look this good…
Over three hundred pounds, Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mould of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. He’s tried every diet under the sun but still he remains stuck in his dead-end job, in love and in his body.
But then he discovers a brand-new, untested weight loss product called Obexity. Desperate for a change, Emmett signs up to the clinical trials and soon he’s shedding pounds at superhuman speed.
With the weight loss comes a new lease on life. He gets promoted. He finds the perfect boyfriend. And people finally treat him like he’s human. But he’s still hungry for more. And the monster lurking inside of him is desperate to come out
A deliciously dark horror novel for fans of Monika Kim, Chelsea G. Summers and Jane Flett.
Praise for Luke Dumas
‘Nothing Tastes As Good is gripping, funny, angry, heartbreaking, urgent, honest, unsparing, and more than a little terrifying’ Nat Cassidy
‘Clever, twisty… left me thrilled and looking over my shoulder’ Paul Tremblay
‘Evocative and provocative… thrilled me and moved me and thrilled me some more’ A. J. Finn
‘Haunting… I consumed this breathlessly’ Megan Collins
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