*Review* This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham

 

Genre: YA Dystopian

Published: April 25, 2023

Pages: 281

From the author of the New York Times bestselling My Dearest Darkest comes another incredible sapphic horror. When four best friends with a hunger for human flesh attend a music festival in the desert they discover a murderous plot to expose and vilify the girls and everyone like them. This summer is going to get gory.

Two years ago, a small percentage of population underwent a transformation known as the Hollowing. Those affected were only able to survive by consuming human flesh. The people who went without quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. Luckily, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy their hunger. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal.

Cut to Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine, four hollow girls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before graduation they decide to attend a musical festival in the heart of the desert. They have a cooler filled with seltzer, vodka, and Synflesh… and are ready to party. 

But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral and ends up killing and eating a boy in one of the bands. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is targeting people like them. And if they can't figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is getting out alive.

I received a copy of this book through Netgalley. This is my honest review. 

This is the teenage zombie thriller I never knew I needed. But the zombies are like the ones  in Disney's Zombies franchise, perfectly docile as long as they have access to fabricated organs, otherwise known as synflesh. And much like the first movie, not everyone is on board with zombies being integrated with humans. 

Our female teenage zombie protagonists are spending a weekend at a music festival in the desert. Everything was going fine until it wasn't and they have to figure out what's going on before it's too late.

This story gripped me from the beginning. I was intrigued by the zombie mechanics, and the romantic tension building between two of them. It was a lot of will they or won't they, and I never felt sure which way they would go. This book reminded me of how much I enjoyed YA thrillers, and for that reason it gets 4.9732 out of 5 stars. - Katie 

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Kayla Cottingham is a YA author and librarian. Her first book, My Dearest Darkest, was a New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestseller. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, Kayla lives in Boston where she loves to go hiking in the woods, play RPGs, and snuggle on the couch with her ridiculously large black cat, Squid.