She’s So Hungry, a new short-story collection by Eliza Clark, is both hilarious and terrifying. It encompasses sci-fi, body horror, dystopian fiction, maritime folklore and a coming-of-age drama. There’s also a ghost story told entirely through online reviews of an Italian-Chinese fusion takeaway, which is more disturbing than it sounds.
Clark’s debut novel Boy Parts (2020) – a black-comedy thriller set in Newcastle – became a word-of-mouth hit, and she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023. Her follow-up novel Penance, published by Faber the same year, was centred around a brutal act of violence committed by a group of teenage girls and framed as a fictional true crime book written by a less-than-scrupulous author. It received rave reviews (including in Dazed) and cemented her reputation as one of the most exciting British writers at work today.
Fans of Clark’s earlier novels won’t be disappointed by She’s So Hungry: it shares the same playfulness and formal inventiveness, the stories are similarly concerned with the theme of power, and while each entry is different from the last, it all feels like the product of a unique and distinctive voice. I spoke with Clark about gender, power, fan fiction, and whether humankind will manage to worm its way out of the climate crisis.
A lot of the relations between men and women depicted in this book are pretty torturous. What, if anything, were you trying to convey about gender relations?
Eliza Clark: Power is one of my big concerns as a writer: how power expresses itself in day-to-day relationships and how violence seems to come out of power wherever it’s being exerted. Gender is just an easy shortcut to exploring that theme. For me, I think it’s interesting that the more egalitarian society becomes, the more pushback there is against that. The way gender relations are changing now is really interesting to me. I don’t know if I have anything particularly revolutionary to say about that, but if you’re interested in sex and power, you’re always going to end up writing about gender, whether you like it or not.
Women are subjugated by men in some of these stories, but in others – like ‘Goth GF’ or the title story – it’s women who have the upper hand. Do you think that complicates what the book is saying about gender and power?
Eliza Clark: I’m interested in structural power and in situations where it doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. We’re often quite quick to assume that women are disempowered in relationships and men are empowered, but depending on the person that’s not always the case. That’s something that I explored quite thoroughly in Boy Parts, my first novel. As much as I’m interested in power dynamics, I’m also interested in subverting and changing them around.
The collection is so varied in terms of genre and setting. Could you talk me through some of your influences?
Eliza Clark: I used to write fan fiction quite regularly, and in 2015 I started writing it about the video game series Mass Effect. So ‘Hollow Bones’ ended up being the oldest story in the collection by far, because it was scraped from this very vague idea I had from this fanfic that I was writing 10 years ago. I was also thinking a lot about other works of sci-fi, like Alien and Event Horizon. There’s a section in Boy Parts that was inspired quite heavily by a really bad K-hole that I got in once, and this story is also inspired by that same experience.
The entire story of ‘Nightstalkers’ was inspired by one line from I’ll Be Gone in the Dark [Michelle McNamara’s true crime book about the Golden State Killer], where McNamara is talking about the culture of prowling in California in the 70s: she writes about teenage boys smoking weed in avocado fields and reading comic books during the day and then doing all this prowling at night. And I just thought, what a line, what perfect protagonist that would be for a short story. I was also listening to a lot of music from the 70s when I was writing it. I got really into The Carpenters and that song ‘Crimson and Clover’, even though it’s from the wrong era – I think because Norman fucking Rockwell had just come out and there’s a song where Lana repeats the phrase over and over. So that one is probably my most music-directed story.
We’re often quite quick to assume that women are disempowered in relationships and men are empowered, but depending on the person that’s not always the case – Eliza Clark
And then, ‘The King’ was heavily inspired by Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Fire Punch, which is a really weird, nasty, post-apocalyptic manga series about humans regenerating continually in a nuclear winter and eating themselves to survive. It’s a long revenge tale. I just thought it was one of the coolest and most fucked up things I’ve ever read, and I wanted to pay homage to it. While I was writing it, I made a few off-handed jokes about Highlander without actually having seen it, so it was also inspired by my vague cultural idea of what Highlander is about.
I loved the story ‘Extinction Event’, in which humanity seems to wriggle its way out of the consequences of the climate crisis, but in a way that perpetuates the same exploitation of the natural world which caused it in the first place. Does this reflect any of your anxieties about the climate? Do you think we might avoid our comeuppance, but in kind of an evil way?
Eliza Clark: That story was born almost entirely out of my own climate anxiety. Years ago, I read an article about an awful plague that was affecting starfish, where they were rotting from the inside out, and pulling off their own arms to try to deal with it. I found it so profoundly disturbing that I always wanted to do something with that premise. The conclusion that a lot of scientists came to was that the plague was becoming so virulent because of changes to the water temperature in the sea. It was around 2014 that I read this, and it felt like one of the first very tangible and upsetting things that I’d read about climate change, beyond this vague sense that temperatures were going to rise.
I wanted the ending of Extinction Event to feel quite open as to whether climate issues are going to be averted because of this creature, and humanity would have to reckon with moral costs exacted by that, or whether there will be some kind of terrible consequence. I feel like every huge innovation in human technology comes with a consequence that nobody ever really thinks about at the time. We’re seeing it now with people pissing about using ChatGPT to write emails, not realising that they’re basically tipping out a bottle of water every time they do that. I was interested in exploring that short-sightedness, but I try not to be too didactic. As much as I agree that fiction is political and should engage with politics, if you just start listing your political views then at that point you may as well write non-fiction.
She’s Always Hungry is out now
