We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Feast While You Can, a queer romantic horror novel by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta—out on October 29th from Grand Central Publishing.
Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that’s dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother’s heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who’s back in town for a spell.
Upon Jagvi’s arrival, an ancient evil is awakened, and a monstrous force infiltrates Angelina’s life. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it—the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?
An introductory note from authors Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta:
This is the third chapter of our new novel, Feast While You Can. Angelina Sicco has had a nasty surprise at her family party: her brother Patrick’s ex-girlfriend Jagvi (an outsider, a fellow lesbian, a thorn in Angelina’s side) is back in town. But even Jagvi’s scornful, discomforting presence isn’t enough to stop Angelina and her cousins from heading down to the cave on her uncle’s property where all the best family legends are told. We’re pleased to invite you to join them. Just watch your step.
III
It was a lovely cave. Pitted walls of rock soared up to the high ceiling, and generations of Sicco graffiti scarred the lower stones. Higher up, out of reach, were paintings by artists unknown, of ancient eyes layered with smoke from centuries of campfires. The occasional glimpse of a sword, the line of a richly embroidered robe.
The cave lay under Franco’s corner of the mountains, just before the land tapered into a ravine. It was an unofficial haunt for the younger generations, their own den where they could moan about their elders and take whatever there was to be taken and drink the rest. One time Angelina and Jethro had spent a whole night out there, sharing stolen oxy and shaking with cold in the cave mouth with the stars wheeling before them. Another night Patrick drank too much and fell asleep while everyone else was still talking, then sleepwalked over to their campfire and pissed into it.
At the back of the cave lay a neat line of stones, barely calf high, placed more as a sign than any genuine barrier. Beyond them stretched the pit. It yawned down, deeper than anyone could tell. Little children were kept away, and adults stopped going once their eyesight began to fade. Sicco teenagers sometimes sat on the edge with their hearts catching in their throats. If they dangled their legs into the pit, there was an acknowledged touch, a curious stroke along the arch of the foot, and then a nudge like a knuckle pressing up against the sole, turning them back.
The air stayed fresh in the cave despite its small mouth, and even a little light seemed to fill it with warmth and honey. The Siccos were proud of it and so kept it to themselves, as they did with all their favorite things.
“My pa said he hid out here for a week,” one of the cousins insisted. “Said he barricaded the entry with rocks and left a little nook for his rifle’s muzzle.”
“How’d he eat, then, dummy?” Angelina said.
Several of the cousins gave her stubborn looks: Sicco family legends were not to be questioned. Despite a fair amount of petty theft and violence, it had been generations since the cops took much interest in the Siccos, so stories like their great-great-great-grandfather’s standoff in the cave over a crate of stolen morphine had taken on mythic dimensions. Nowadays there wasn’t even a police department in Cadenze. The boys in blue were outsourced from Myrna, showing up occasionally to bust meth houses or search for runaways. Like everyone in her town, Angelina distrusted them and steered clear of all federal uniforms. Even the fortnightly garbage collectors made her hackles rise.
“He’d left supplies up here,” tried Cousin Eugene, a teenager with yellow hair and a glass eye. “Just in case.”
“I heard he took some of the morphine,” another suggested. “Kept his appetite down.”
“And his shooting straight,” Patrick said, exchanging a grimace with Angelina. The two of them had been raised with Caro’s disdain for her forefathers’ exploits. The once-in-a-generation daughters were the significant members of the Sicco clan, Caro had explained, dropping a conciliatory kiss on Patrick’s head. The men were just there to support their lone and courageous women. Thanks, Ma, Patrick had said, his face tight like he knew it was true and felt all its weight. Angelina was fifteen then, and she and Patrick had been living on their own for two years.
“You two only like the really gruesome stories,” Jethro complained.
“Nothing too gruesome!” Angelina said. “But Beloved Great-Whatever-Paw-Paw just seems tame when you think about the Myrna kid killer. Or the thing in the pit.”
“That’s not about our pit,” Patrick said comfortably. “No matter how much you want it to be.”
“It could be our pit!”
“The thing in the pit is on the other side of town,” another cousin said. “Under the Pepper Grinder.”
“I heard it was back Maudoro way, not even in Cadenze.”
“Wait,” one of the girlfriends said, frowning. “What’s the thing in the pit?” Whoops of delight through the cave, and a mild argument sprang up as to who should tell the story. Patrick won, eager to take the stage, perhaps because of Jagvi’s presence.
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Patrick always looked best when he was performing. He dabbled as a front man for fledgling local rock bands, and he liked to lose himself in the set, his long, dark hair released from its customary ponytail and swarming around him while he snarled into a microphone. At home he was quieter, more thoughtful. He could be a stickler for rules and followed a constant duty to behave well, as if some absent authority were always hovering over his shoulder. He hated to be late for work and couldn’t leave a parking ticket unpaid for more than a day, his mouth thinning as he worried over some new favor their mother had asked of him.
But he changed when there was a crowd before him. Shoulders squared, expressive hands. His jaw sloped slightly toward the left, and paired with his deep-set eyes, it gave him a devil-may-care attitude that looked excellent on a band poster or amid the boys at happy hour or now, in the yellow lantern light of the cave, telling the story of the thing in the pit. He leaned forward with his beer held high.
“Okay, so,” he said, “once there was and once there wasn’t a monster that lived in the mountains. This monster wasn’t like the wolves, who ate flesh, or the bats, who drank blood. This monster came down into town once in a while to eat a whole life.”
A chorus of protest: already he wasn’t telling it right, he’d already missed—
“It’s my version!” Patrick maintained. “You can have your turn telling it later. So. The monster hounded the town. Fathers woke up with no sons where an heir used to be, just an empty bed and a wardrobe full of clothes with no memories of the person who wore them. Men appeared at their weddings only to find their girls didn’t exist, even though the church was filled with flowers and the priest was waiting to be paid. That’s the thing about this monster. It’s not hungry for your death, it’s hungry for your life.”
“No, no,” Eugene said, shaking his head. “See, this is why your version doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t eat your life. It eats your future.”
“Same difference,” Patrick said.
“Actually, it’s not,” said another cousin, Matthew, a community college teacher about a decade older than the rest of them, clearly only here for the weed. He took a lordly toke from the joint circling the crowd. “Your version ends with death, and death is fast. It’s just another moment in your life. The last moment, but still a moment, and often a short one. The legend says that’s not enough sustenance for the thing in the pit. It wants the future that could have been yours, and it eats every morsel.”
“Futures,” Eugene corrected. “Because you could do all kinds of things, you know, like maybe you marry this girl or maybe that one, and that changes your life. And maybe you become a priest or maybe you become a farmer, and that changes your life, too. And the thing from the pit eats all of those lives, all that potential, and that’s how it gets full enough to sleep for as long as it does. And in the meantime, you’re not dead and gone to heaven or the grave, you’re being consumed, forever, it licks every trace of you out of the world, until no one even remembers your name.”
“Eugene’s getting way too excited about this,” Jethro said.
“Yeah,” Angelina said, starting to giggle with him, “tell us more about being consumed—”
“You guys are ruining the story with all this technical bullshit,” Patrick complained. “You wanna hear what happened or not?”
General laughter and agreement that yes, they did.
“One day, the monster’s walking down the road when it sees a girl with a tasty-looking life. Or future, whatever, it can tell she’s young and pretty and it wants to eat her.”
“Eat every possible version of her,” Eugene cut in, “every kid she might have, every song she might sing—”
“Every guy she might fuck,” someone interrupted. Even Patrick laughed this time.
“Yeah, exactly. It wants to take all of that away until she’s just a shell without a past, or a future. Worse than being a corpse. But then her husband steps in.” Angelina added, “And he’s like, What was that about her fucking other guys?”
“Thanks, Nini,” Patrick said. “No, the husband steps in and says the monster can eat him instead. He can’t bear to live in a world where his wife never existed. It’s a noble sacrifice. The monster agrees, probably the man’s life is even richer food than his wife’s. So it’s about to sit down to eat, when the wife says, ‘Wait, you shouldn’t eat him on the side of the road, you don’t want people gawking at you or interrupting. I know a cave further down the hill, why don’t we go there together and then you can eat.’ And the monster agrees.”
“Classic mistake,” Jethro muttered to Angelina, who snickered into her palm.
“And when they get to the cave, the monster’s already gnashing its teeth”— Patrick bared his canines—“when the wife says, ‘Oh, but it’s so cold here at the mouth of the cave, why don’t we go further back, where it will be warm.’”
“Women always have to be warm,” somebody grumbled, and the others shushed him.
“So they go to the back of the cave. And the monster’s really ready to eat now, it’s starving. But they’ve delayed for so long that the sun is setting, and it’s so low that the light is coming into the cave. So the wife says, ‘I can see that the light is bothering you, why don’t you move back a little further?’ ” He widened his eyes in mock-feminine innocence. “And the monster takes one more step back and falls straight down into the pit.” He clapped his hands, loud enough that the sound bounced around the cave’s steep walls. One of the girlfriends yelped.
The rest of the party cheered, in part for Patrick’s storytelling and in part for their own pit, the star of the show.
Angelina said, “In Caro’s version, the wife pushes the monster in herself.”
“That’s the feminist version,” Jethro said. He wagged his finger at Angelina. “Don’t you get too carried away with that kind of talk, young lady.”
Angelina laughed. “Too late. I’ve been indoctrinated.”
Jethro made the sign of the cross. “Then may God have mercy on your soul.”
“But did it die, when she pushed it in?” Eugene’s little girlfriend asked. She twisted to stare behind her. “Or is it still down there in the pit?”
Eugene hugged her close. “It might not even have been this pit. There’s plenty of holes in the caves around here. The biggest one was in a cave that fell in years ago, during the Second World War. I heard there was a whole family hiding inside when it collapsed.”
“That could have been the inspiration for the whole story,” Matthew said. Behind his back, Jethro caught Angelina’s eye and mimed shooting himself. “I always thought the way the thing eats futures is like a war, isn’t it? You have all these grand plans for your life and your family and your country, and then the war arrives and takes it all.”
“The story’s older than the war,” Gemma objected. “My great-great-grandpa used to tell it to my grandpa. Gramps said that when he got to the bit about the pit, he’d open his mouth and smack his gums at Gramps and say that when you got old, the monster pulled out all your teeth and found somewhere deep inside you to hide.”
“Ewwwww,” Angelina said, delighted.
“So it’s still not the Sicco pit,” Jagvi said.
“Our pit looks the type, though, doesn’t it,” Patrick said, nudging her.
Quiet as the family turned to look back at the line of stones, the dark chasm gaping beyond.
“Ughhhhh,” Eugene’s girlfriend said. “I hate ghost stories. We need a protector.” She snuggled in closer against Eugene.
“Men don’t work,” Matthew said, voice solemn. “Didn’t you hear? It eats men’s futures up.” He considered. “There’s legends about animals resisting it.”
“Oh my god, where’s Your Dog?” Jethro asked Angelina, and the cousins cracked up.
“My Dog would be fucking useless,” Angelina said. “If she met a monster, she’d roll over for it to scratch her belly.”
“Where is she?” Jethro asked.
“I left her up at the house,” Angelina said. “Haunted or not, she’d run straight into the pit. Forget about the monster eating lives, I can’t let it eat my damn dog.”
“San Rocco wouldn’t let it,” Jethro said. “Nonna told me once that the stupider a dog is, the more San Rocco protects it. Idiots go straight to heaven.”
“No wonder he’s Cadenze’s patron,” Patrick said. It was a mean joke, made for Jagvi’s benefit. Angelina gave him a derisive look, and he stuck his chin out, stubborn.
“My mama used to say that the thing in the pit was San Rocco’s dog,” Eugene put in. “And that he’d send it to chase children home if they stayed out too late.”
“My mama used to say that the thing in the pit was the saint who lived in Cadenze before San Rocco claimed it,” Jethro said. “And all its love and care for the town had twisted to hate because we don’t remember it.”
A few of the cousins turned inquiring looks on Angelina and Patrick. Jethro and Eugene’s mamas, though respected Cadenze matrons, were not Sicco blood; only Angelina’s mama could make the final, definitive call. Angelina shrugged. “There’s a million versions of it.”
“They all mean the same thing in the end,” Jagvi put in. Angelina startled, surprised that Jagvi cared enough to have an opinion. “This town swallows up options.”
The mood in the cave soured. Angelina’s cousins considered the outsider with distrust. Jagvi didn’t seem to notice, leaning back on her palms, eyes on Angelina like it was still just the two of them. But Patrick laughed.
“You’ve always hated the thing in the pit. You prefer the Bloody Doctor,” he added, referring to the myth of a Cadenze physician who had gone crazy and run into the hills, preying on unsuspecting hikers to practice his rusty surgery skills. Patrick’s hand folded around Jagvi’s head like a big cap, tousling her hair. “Something you can punch.”
A bottle of wine reached Angelina, and she took a swig, considering her brother. If you threw something into the pit at the back of their cave, you could wait forever and never hear it land. Patrick had a similar pit inside himself, and it was where he kept his love for Jagvi. No matter how many times she messed up, Patrick never stopped forgiving her. The wine hit Angelina’s throat harshly. “The thing in the pit too frightening for you, Jag?”
Jagvi answered her directly, untroubled. “It frightened me a lot when I was a kid, yeah. When I was six, one of the other kids in my class told me that Cadenze was haunted by the thing in the pit and once it had eaten your soul, you just walked around like a zombie, all eaten up. And even if I thought people were normal, they’d actually be gone. He said maybe it had eaten my dad.”
“Kids are so creepy,” Patrick said.
“The pit is creepy,” Jagvi said. “Kids get it.”
“Maybe you just need to get to know it,” Angelina said, standing and taking another swig from the bottle before she handed it on. “Now that you’re on your big welcome home tour.”
“I’m not sure a Sicco family party counts as a tour,” Jagvi said, but she watched Angelina closely. As Angelina wandered over toward the pit, she thought she even saw Jagvi tense.
“No? Well, let’s invite someone else,” she said, and cupped her hands around her mouth, stooping to the deep black of the pit. For a moment the depth was dizzying, and then Angelina got her balance. She called down into the drop, her voice bouncing. “Yoo-hoo! Jag’s home! Wanna come say hello?”
“You’re gonna kill yourself leaning over that,” Jagvi said.
Angelina kicked one of the rocks gathered at the pit, knocking it over the edge. Her thirteen cousins and their respective girlfriends fell silent, listening to it clatter and fall, until the sound faded beyond their reach. No one spoke.
Then Angelina turned and shrugged. “Guess it’s not one of your fans.”
Her cousins laughed, and Patrick shook his head, rolling his eyes. Jagvi slouched against his shoulder, exuding the indulgent air of someone allowing a child to act out at a party. It was the same condescending energy that Angelina had loathed her entire adult life, and it should have thrown her into the usual mix of embarrassment and annoyance. Instead she felt pleased.
Good Joke, said the pit.
Thanks, thought Angelina.
Excerpted from Feast While You Can, copyright © 2024 by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta.
