Hunger Pains

A haunting tale of fraught sibling relationships and unreliable narrators, perfect for fans of Mona Awad’s dream-like atmosphere and Lucy Rose’s twisted family dynamics.

Alex Ashford-Black and her twin brother Charlie disappeared when they were fourteen. Upon their return a month later, they told a story no one believed—of a dark world filled with carnivorous beings and a man named Grey who took them there to feed off their burgeoning talents. 

Twenty years later, the veneer of normalcy they’ve crafted is falling apart. Alex, a formerly bestselling writer addicted to male validation, is immolating her self-worth in a toxic affair. Charlie, a rising star of the art world, begins to unravel as hallucinations claw at the edges of his reality. And their younger sister Verity drifts through the wreckage of her privilege—recklessly spending her trust fund and listening to the ramblings of their paranoid, reclusive mother. 

Then Verity vanishes. And Alex knows, deep in the part of herself she’s spent two decades silencing, that her sister is not just missing. She has been taken—back to the place Alex swore never existed. To save her sister, Alex must return to the Other Place. But it’s not just the monsters waiting for her there. It’s herself.

An unsettling psychological horror full of slow-creeping dread and heart-wrenching family drama, Hunger Pains explores what happens when the things that take us never really let us go.