A cannibal body horror that makes fat shame its victim, not its excuse.
The author of A History of Fear and The Paleontologist on his third novel, Nothing Tastes as Good, the weight-loss drug that eats the world, and the mask we hand to strangers.
Kate Moss said nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, and Luke Dumas took a knife to the sentence. His third novel keeps the front half of that old pro-ana catechism and bins the rest, because the thing Emmett Truesdale hungers for was never skinny. It was to be treated like a person.
Dumas has spent three books writing men eaten alive by their own heads. Grayson Hale, the Edinburgh grad student of A History of Fear, certain the Devil is coming for him. Simon Nealy in The Paleontologist, gutted by the sister the museum swallowed on his watch. Now Emmett, three hundred pounds and folding graphic tees at a San Diego Target, who enrols in a clinical trial for a weight-loss drug called Obexity and starts waking up covered in blood. Nothing Tastes as Good lands in the middle of the Ozempic decade, and it is meaner, funnier and sadder than its cannibal logline lets on.
Dumas has been carrying this one since he was thirteen. So let’s start where the book started, with a stolen paperback.
“He Just Wanted to Be Seen”: Luke Dumas on Cannibal Cravings, the Ozempic Era, and Writing Fat Shame as Body Horror
You found Thinner in a secondhand shop at thirteen, and you have said Emmett’s story then came out almost too easily, because you had already lived his shame for thirty years. When a book arrives that fully formed, what did you actually have to invent rather than remember, and where did the invented parts argue with the ones you already carried?
Nothing Tastes as Good is by far my most autobiographical book. Certain scenes are ripped straight from my life. Others are composites of people I’ve encountered and experiences I’ve had a thousand times, with the volume turned up ever so slightly. The out-of-pocket comments. The workplace discrimination. The monstrous stepdad.
Of course, I invented a few elements—for example, Emmett’s ride-or-die BFF, Lizette, to add some levity and balance out his internalized self-loathing. And I can’t claim firsthand experience with murder, cannibalism, or the more egregious abuse Emmett experiences. But so much of this book—from his bid for vengeance to the predatory biopharmaceutical company—feels, at least to me, like an extension of reality rather than a break from it.
The title keeps the first half of Kate Moss’s mantra and quietly amputates “as skinny feels.” What does cutting off that second clause let the novel say about what Emmett is truly starving for, in a way the full slogan never could?
Evoking the Moss quote was a great way to nod to the heroin-chic diet culture in which Emmett was raised, and by which many of us are still traumatized. But I wanted the effect to be very different. Lopping off the back half excises the fatphobia, turning it from a weight-loss mantra into a declaration of indulgence as an act of defiance. Once you realize the book includes cannibalism, the title gets even better, taking on a dark, twisted, and—dare I say—delicious undertone.
The smartest move in the book, to my mind, is the split between registers: the third person sits close enough to feel Emmett’s shame as body heat, while his first-person voice is all Instagram captions and blog posts, the face he builds for an audience. You take the voice we usually trust for a character’s bare insides and hand it to the performance instead, so how early did you know the first person had to be the mask, and what did that inversion cost you as you built the two Emmetts against each other?
I always intended for there to be a balance of third and first person, but it wasn’t until I started drafting that first blog post that I observed how different Emmett’s voice was inside it. It gave me pause initially. Does this even sound like the same person? The answer was not really—and now I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
At the same time, I found myself resisting the temptation to enforce firm boundaries between his public and private selves. I’m interested in the idea of the “social media self” as a liminal space between authenticity and performance—the way the online masses crave, even demand, realness and vulnerability, but turn on you the second you expose too much. It wasn’t so much a matter of building the Emmetts against each other, but showing an interplay between them, a sort of tug-of-war between his desire to be seen and his fear of being exposed.
You refuse to sprint Emmett toward the gore. Before any blood there is a seatbelt that will not click and a job interview that goes nowhere. What made you trust that the small, ordinary humiliations would hold a horror reader long before the cannibalism arrives?
It was a leap of faith for sure. But as much as I love thrills and chills, I never write with the goal of scaring. I write to move readers and make them think; horror is just the lens through which I do it. In order for Emmett’s story to land with real impact, it was more important that he feel like a real person with real-life stakes than that the scares come fast and furious. By the time the murder and cannibalism arrives, it feels like more than spectacle; it feels like justice. And for me, that’s way more terrifying than the blood.
Obexity turns the man the world called a problem into a thing that eats the people who wronged him, which flirts with the oldest fatphobic shorthand going: the fat body as appetite made monstrous. How did you steer toward that image on purpose without letting the novel quietly endorse the very cruelty it means to gut, and where was the line you would not cross with Emmett’s body?
How better to dismantle the fatphobic trope than to flip it on its head? In Nothing Tastes as Good, the obese man’s eating is out of control, but his cravings don’t turn monstrous until he begins to drop pounds. It’s the product sold to him by the weight-loss industry that corrupts him, helping to divorce the depravity from the fatness itself and dispersing the blame more broadly, while never excusing Emmett from his share. My goal here was not just to flip the trope, but to complicate it, making it as thorny and complex as the social issues it’s grappling with.
I crossed just about every line there is with Emmett’s body, but it was important that each instance remained layered and meaningful. Whether he’s suffering through bad sex or eating the tongue out of a guy’s mouth, I tried hard to make sure the violence enacted on and with his body never tipped over into gratuitous shock value.
The cruellest idea in the book is not the killing. It is that Emmett is treated as human only once he is thin, and that his mother fed him love while starving herself in front of him. What emotional problem were you trying to solve by making acceptance, not violence, the force that finally undoes him?
I’m fascinated by our need for social acceptance—what drives it, how far we’ll go to achieve it, and how not all acceptance is created equal. One of Emmett’s most self-destructive impulses is his tendency to gorge on the empty calories of strangers’ conditional acceptance over the unconditional love of those closest to him.
It’s an impulse I struggled with myself when I lost nearly a hundred pounds in college and resented my best friend’s never mentioning it, denying me the dopamine rush of “You look amazing” to avoid implying there had been anything wrong with me. I appreciate that so much now, but I loathed it then. In crafting Emmett’s arc,it was important for me to expose that ugly truth.
Across all three novels you build the story out of found paper. Grayson’s prison manuscript in A History of Fear, the dead curator’s research diaries in The Paleontologist, and now Emmett’s blogs, emails and interview transcripts. Why do you keep telling your scariest stories through documents a character wrote for someone else to read, and what does that mediated distance give you that a straight narration would not?
I love the dynamic reading experience you get with a multimedia novel. With the insertion of a found document, you not only shift the perspective, but you shift the whole mode of storytelling. It breaks the readers out of their routine without pulling them out of the story. In fact, when done well, it can draw them in deeper, immersing them in a world that now feels a little realer.
It also evokes one of my favorite tropes: the unreliable narrator. Even if the document includes a familiar voice, you can’t be in that character’s head. You can’t be sure of their motives or whether they’re telling the truth. When I want to throw a wrench in the story, I insert a document. It’s a great way to keep readers guessing.
A History of Fear grew out of your Edinburgh years and openly borrows the nested, is-he-mad-or-is-it-real machinery of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I read it in a city where that book is practically local scripture. What did wrangling that Scottish confession form on your debut teach you about writing an unreliable narrator you also want the reader to love, a problem you clearly faced again with Emmett?
The book-within-a-book structure of A History of Fear—centering a first-person found manuscript presented by a fictional editor, who intercuts her own investigations into the narrative—was challenging to figure out, but it ended up working well. I wanted something similar for Nothing Tastes as Good, but I didn’t want the reader to doubt and question Emmett like they do Grayson in Fear; that would have felt like a perpetuation of society’s tendency to distrust the testimony of fat people about their own bodies and experiences. I wanted to give readers an unfiltered, front-row seat to Emmett’s life, so I flipped it: his close third-person narration became the anchor, with the editorial insertions representing the dubious eyes of society.
Both Grayson and Emmett have a lot of me in them, and after some readers criticized Grayson for being “unlikeable,” I was surprised—and honestly, a bit relieved—by how warmly embraced Emmett was. To me, these characters are not so different once you start peeling back layers, but to some readers they feel miles apart. It’s been fascinating and instructive to look back at the choices I made in constructing each of them and realize how small, even superficial changes in how a character sees themselves, or is described by others, can drastically alter a reader’s perception, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.
You have said you nearly wrote Emmett as a straight woman for commercial reasons, then trusted your gut and wrote him as a fat gay man instead, a call that plainly paid off. Was there an earlier point in your career when you ignored that same instinct, and what did learning to trust it change about how you now choose which idea to chase?
I’ve had some version of this dilemma with every book, yet I seem utterly incapable of listening to that voice in my head and always end up writing the book as first envisioned. I’m wary of pigeonholing myself as an author who writes only about and from the perspective of queer men—and my next book will see me branch out considerably—but these days, I’ve settled into my instincts a little more. Instead of wondering if my character will alienate people, I ask better questions: Does this voice feel right for this story? Does it feel distinct from my other protagonists? Is this a story only I can tell?
Body horror is having a decade. The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister, the new film Saccharine and your novel all landed in the same GLP-1 moment, all circling beauty, thinness and the price of the acceptable body. Once the miracle drug is simply normal, the way Ozempic already is, where does this wave of body horror have left to go, and what starts to look dated fast?
I have no idea. Weight-loss medicine is moving so fast it’s impossible to predict what new horror engine Big Pharma will throw at us next. But what stands out to me is that the best stories in this vein aren’t really about drugs and treatments. They’re about society, and they connect on a deep, universal, emotional level. I was lucky that my idea for this book overlapped with the GLP-1 craze, giving it a timely commercial hook. But the themes I wanted to explore—shame, hunger, identity, acceptance—predate Ozempic considerably and, I have no doubt, won’t feel dated for a long, long time.
You have written about loving Roxane Gay and Lindy West on fatness, yet you reached for a cannibal novel rather than memoir to say your piece. What can horror do with fat shame that Hunger or Shrill, for all their honesty, structurally cannot?
I believe both approaches are valuable, and I’ve written nonfiction on my fat gay experience as well. What horror does better is allow me to offer the reader some catharsis and comeuppance that’s harder to achieve within the confines of my lived experience (there are no half-eaten corpses in my trunk, sadly). In real life, fat people very rarely get revenge on the people who have hurt them; in horror, anything goes.
The two-register structure sets a booby trap. If the first-person posts are performance and the third person is the truth, the reader has to feel the gap without you ever spelling it out. What was the hardest technical fix you needed to keep those two Emmetts from cancelling each other out, especially once his public voice starts lying about the blood?
There’s a point in the book when Emmett starts to suspect what Obexity is doing to him, but for various reasons he can’t acknowledge it publicly. At this point, his participant health journals take on a critical new function, serving as a bridge between his inner monologue and his public performance.
Through them, he sends messages of barely veiled alarm to the makers of Obexity, seeking reassurance, help, even intervention. Because the journals aren’t public—and he’s not sure who, if anyone, is reading them on the other side of his computer screen—they feel like a safe space in which to voice his concern. It’s here that we see Emmett begin to spiral toward the inevitable collision of his public and inner selves, with disastrous consequences.
One reviewer said the book barely had to work for its scares, because her own brain already runs a “do not eat that” monologue on a loop. You are writing dread for readers who turn up already frightened of their own appetite. At the sentence level, how do you tighten fear in someone whose self-surveillance is doing half your job, and did that change the way you wrote about food itself?
I wrote this book from the gut—I mean that literally. One of the big challenges I set myself was conveying the private hell of binge eating disorder to readers who have no history of it, and to do it effectively enough to shift their view of overconsumption from “People should just make better choices” to “Okay, I see why that’s not so simple for some.”
My approach was to pour my lived experience onto the page in as sensory a way as possible, forcing the reader to experience the binge from inside Emmett’s mind and body. The intrusive thoughts. The fat and sugar pangs that feel as urgent as an open wound. The physical pain/relief of eating to overfullness. The deluge of shame that follows. Establishing this as Emmett’s baseline and go-to coping mechanism does a lot of the work for me. I barely need to hint at his monstrous cravings for the collapse of his restraint to feel inevitable. It is a cannibalistic trainwreck waiting to happen.
Here is the part that stops me. You turned in a novel that guts the weight-loss industry, then your own doctor put you on Mounjaro, a cousin of the drug you had just invented, and you have asked in print whether that makes you a hypocrite. Now that you are thinner, and the world may be starting to treat you the way it treats Emmett once the weight falls off, do you feel more seen, and what does that tell you, honestly, about whether the bargain your own book calls a horror is one you would refuse if you had the choice again?
I’ve lost eighty pounds since starting on Mounjaro for type 2 diabetes. It’s not my first major weight-loss journey, so I was prepared for a lot of it. Still, I see the way my writing career has leveled up and my online following has grown as I’ve dropped that weight, and it’s hard not to feel conflicted given the criticisms I articulate in this book.
I had to be fat to do this story justice, but I had to be thinner for people to want to read it. At least, that’s what the voice in my head wants me to think. But if that’s true, it’s just kind of proving the whole point of the book, isn’t it?
Would I allow myself to become a cannibal to keep the weight off? I’m rarely an early adopter of trends, but who’s to say I wouldn’t get there in the end? If eating people was the key to the perfect body, I have a feeling cannibalism would lose its stigma almost immediately. They’d be selling human meat in supermarkets within a matter of months, packed with a new, market-tested name. (Impossible Meat is taken. Perhaps Unthinkable? Inconceivable?) Oh, and I have the perfect marketing slogan: Nothing tastes as good!
Your three narrators are all men trying to outrun a body or a mind that will not let them, and all three lose. Emmett would rather be a monster who is seen than a man who is invisible. Do you think that is a horror writer’s exaggeration, or the quiet deal most people are actually making right now, and if it is the second one, what would it truly cost a person to say no?
I hope it’s an exaggeration, but like all of my protagonists’ struggles, it’s rooted in something human and real. Glance through this book’s Goodreads reviews and you’ll see how powerful an experience it is to be seen, and how rarely American media hands fat people that opportunity.
Some people are saying no to GLP-1s, because, like Lizette, they don’t trust them or are taking a principled stance. I’m happy for those people and hope society changes to offer them more respect, kindness, quality care, and opportunity. But those people are not me. Those people are not Emmett. I think this book resonates because most of us find ourselves stuck somewhere in the middle of craving acceptance and knowing it’s fundamentally empty. It is the struggle, more than the outcome, that compels me, and where I think empathy and compassion are most needed in this moment.
Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas
‘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
Luke Dumas
Luke Dumas is the USA Today bestselling author of horror and thriller including the novels Nothing Tastes as Good, The Paleontologist, and A History of Fear.
He is the winner of a 2024 ITW Thriller Award for Best Paperback Original, was nominated for the Silver Falchion Award for Best Supernatural, and his work has been optioned for film and TV.
He received his master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh and has worked in nonprofit philanthropy for more than a decade.
Luke was born and raised in San Diego, California, where he works for a biomedical research institute.
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