The Starving Bride
by Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s ninth novel contains echoes of her 2025 bestseller The Book of Guilt. The setting is again the ‘near future’ of a dystopian Britain, the tone is sinister, and things are not what they seem on the surface. While The Book of Guilt was an expansive novel, exploring ideas to do with nature versus nurture, unwitting sacrifice and state cruelty, The Starving Bride takes a more laser-like approach. The eponymous bride stands in for themes such as body dysphoria, online pro anorexia groups, and public display.

At her boring processing job, Hazel Whitlock, a 23-year-old English woman, has been carving almonds into skulls. Hazel has a talent for ruining things: her job, which she loses because of the skulls, and boyfriend Aaron, with whom, in an ill-advised moment, she shares the shameful secret from her past. So it seems a happy omen when she stumbles on an advertisement for Blackpool, where her old friend Gilda from ballet class is now a showgirl. Don’t you long for the way things used to be? is the marketing slogan.

Blackpool Council have reintroduced various old, cancelled acts to try to perk up the town. It’s called the #ASimplerTime campaign. Except of course this is a Chidgey world, so the simpler times aren’t necessarily going to be wholesome, and many of the revived amusements are disturbing. Hazel, for instance, arrives in the middle of a midget wedding.  ‘They have one every week,’ said Gilda. ‘It’s not real – you know that, right?’ Well might Gilda point out the unreality of the place: it’s a gigantic stage set of fakery.

The Starving Bride is one such old act, complete with back story: a young woman, too poor to marry her beloved, earns money by going on display in a glass casket and ‘starves’ for forty days. (No mention of a fictional fiancé starving himself.) And the payout is huge – if the bride can last the distance. Hazel, who is already vulnerable, takes on the role with alacrity. ‘Mightn’t she cancel the past? Starving in public … All eyes on her. It was almost funny.’

Trussed up in a white wedding dress and veil, clutching a bunch of waxy arum lilies, Hazel goes on display for the paying public. A ‘ravenous’ lion is released to prowl around her glass casket. Each night, Hazel disappears into her windowless flat to eat processed food and watch TV.

Chidgey’s excellent writing seduces us into this world, despite the repulsive subject matter. There is, after all, a public fascination in car wrecks, in celebrity disasters. The Starving Bride sideshow, we are told in the Author’s Note, was a hit in the 1930s. To our contemporary sensibilities, it seems recklessly tasteless in its encouragement of female starvation.

Meanwhile, Councillor Frank Marsh is obsessed with the health of the famous Blackpool Tower, which he believes to be weather damaged and unstable. ‘He could feel the press of the Tower, the two-and-a-half tons of steel bearing down on the sandy earth – and yet here around the unlit fireplace people laughed and drank, fanned themselevs with menus and photographed their meals.’ Naturally, nobody is heeding the party pooper.

And so the main ideas of the book are established. We know that the tower is going to collapse, the lion will get loose, and Hazel will take her role far too literally and stop eating. Chidgey does not disappoint.

In The Book of Guilt, the quintessential British seaside resort of Margate with its sideshows, arcades and rides was used as an enticement for the story’s genetically cloned protagonists. Here, Chidgey puts us right inside Blackpool in all its gawdy trashiness.

Soft toys hung by their necks in amusement arcades, and shops displayed mountains of candyfloss, sticks of rock and slabs of fudge. The air was thick with sugar; gusts of the stuff flooded the hot morning. There were ice-cream parlours and chip shops and palmists, and tearooms with waitresses in starched white aprons, and Madame Tussauds, where you could pose for photos with wax royals so real it seemed even the dead ones might speak.

Stag groups play up; girls vomit in the streets. ‘Empty pink gin and tonic cans cluttered the pavement; a Bride-To-Be sash hung impaled on the fence of the place next door … Further along, someone had tied a penis-shaped balloon to the stop sign.’

Frank seems to echo the authorial voice. ‘And wasn’t this the real Blackpool? Not the sham along the Prom, but its strange mirror-world?’

The Starving Bride sideshow epitomises this tackiness, and the voyeuristic public who pay to see her are lampooned mercilessly. ‘All day they came in dribs and drabs, remarking on her chubby thumbs, the suntan marks on her shoulders …’ Hazel can’t escape their inane voices. ‘Is she asleep? Hi there. I said HI THERE. ARE YOU ASLEEP? Is this it? No, there’s the lion. He’s asleep too. Excuse me, have we missed it? No, this is it.’

Xander the lion is, of course, far from ravenous. He is actually a bit motheaten, thin and scarred, a prisoner in his fake African savannah. In a kind of reverse metamorphosis, he will grow plump and glossy as Hazel starves, as if feeding off her obsession. They develop a symbiotic relationship – Xander licking Hazel through the casket air holes, and Hazel flashing back to her binge-eating teenage years – eating as if her body had turned into ‘a wild animal’.

Hazel also relives the dark moment during Year 11 revision camp when, weighing 18 stone, she was filmed masturbating with a block of Toblerone, ‘the plastic-covered mattress buckling beneath the bloated body.’ The clip goes viral. The jokes are terrible. ‘Jessica Moss asked if she’d taken precautions, and if not was she worried she might be pregnant with a Malteser?’ Her life is completely ruined. In response, she starves herself.

Frank’s teenage daughter, Grace, is also prey to fad diets. She and her friends have Starving Bride tee-shirts. ‘She wore it knotted high above her navel to show off her shrinking fame.’ These girls are on an app called Anabelle – a pro-ana online community that seeks to normalise the unhealthy behaviour of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. ‘We log everything, even water.’

They are hero-worshipping Hazel in her public starvation. She’s the hit of the season. She is seen: ‘what she’d wanted all along, what she’d secretly desired, what every woman who watched her desired, was a different body.’ The Anabelles are besotted: ‘silent girls with no flesh on their frames, eyes too big for their faces … staring at Hazel as if they might consume her.’

The situation is bad enough for Gilda and the management to start worrying about Hazel.

‘Darling, you need to eat,’ said Gilda.

Will nodded. ‘It’s getting dangerous, love. I can’t have a suicide on my hands.’

‘I’m not killing myself.’

Gilda stroked her arm. ‘It looking a lot like you are, Haze.’

‘It’s an act.’

‘Not any more.’

In keeping with media content warnings, this book does offer a note at the end about who to contact if you are concerned about eating disorders. It seems oddly inadequate, given the nature of the story.

This is a clever, unusual novel. Ultimately, however, it is hard to care about Hazel and her self-loathing followers, or about the fate of the Blackpool Tower. After Chidgey’s previous, weightier novels, also aimed at an international audience, The Starving Bride feels a little slight.