Luke Dumas’ new book Nothing Tastes Is Good is weighty body horror

Luke Dumas. // photo credit Chelsea V Photography

Luke Dumas‘ new book, Nothing Tastes As Good, sees the author of A History of Fear and The Paleontologist tackling the story of “300-pound retail worker Emmett Truesdale, who, desperate for help, enrolls in a clinical trial for a new and mysterious weight loss product: Obexity.”

Presented both as a traditional novel, while also cleverly utilizing epistolary elements like Instagram posts, blog entries, and emails to craft Truesdale’s story, Dumas’ novel is a relentlessly-paced story. If you loved The Substance, Nothing Tastes As Good tackles similar subject matter, while also delving much more deeply into the emotional ups and downs of body image.

Sticky and gross imagery that would make director Stuart Gordon proud sits side-by-side with a deeply resonant look at a character who wants to be accepted, and so we hopped on Zoom with author Luke Dumas ahead of Nothing Tastes As Good‘s release from Atria Books on Tuesday, March 31.

The Pitch: This is an intense book. I feel like the book itself accurately conveys Emmett’s state of mind in the way I felt reading it. Was that your intent from the start?

Luke Dumas: Yeah. I think my intent was really to just show a new perspective. It’s such a personal book for me. It’s written from a lot of my personal experience with weight gain and weight loss. I’ve gained a hundred pounds and lost a hundred pounds and done that a couple of times–and just growing up, always feeling too big for the world. I just wanted to show that experience: what it’s like to live in that kind of body.

The horror elements are inspired by Stephen King’s Thinner. That was the big or the first adult novel I ever read, the first horror novel I ever read when I was 13. I always loved that concept–that dramatic weight loss concept. I always wanted to nod to that in a book in some way and this just became the perfect vehicle for that. You really see Emmett unravel and that was fun too, but it really started from a place of something more authentic, just wanting to like really explore his emotional experience, what he goes through.

And then these themes, as Ozempic and these weight loss drugs start to become more popular, our conversations are changing around fat and weight loss, and what is a legitimate way to lose weight? I just wanted to explore all of that through the story.

I’m a sucker for any sort of book that uses blog entries or posts or anything like that. One of my favorite subgenres of literature is an epistolary novel. The thing about it is that allows you to explore–as you just mentioned–the idea of weight loss and how you lose weight. People think Emmett is losing weight via diet and exercise, and then when he comes out and reveals that it is, in fact, a drug, it is very similar to the backlash to Ozempic.

Thank you. Yeah. I really enjoy those interstitial elements as well, like semi-epistolary. I’ve written a couple of books like that, and I really enjoy it. For this one, it’s a little different in that we have the traditional narrative, the third-person narrative, where we’re getting into Emmett’s head, and then we have these first-person narratives.

Typically, when you think of a first-person narrative, that’s where it’s a more immediate experience; you’re really in the character’s head, and you have the most immediate access to their emotions. But this kind of turns that on its head because when he’s writing in first person, he’s projecting out into the social sphere. He’s writing a blog post or a social post, so we feel almost more distant from him. It’s how he’s projecting his personality.

So yeah, you get to see what he really thinks and feels, but also how he’s trying to be perceived and how all of that validation he’s getting from social media is impacting him personally and his third-person narrative. It was fun to play with that and play with those little different types of documents, and yeah, how they can complicate our narrative or complicate our understanding of what Emmett’s going through.

It is a complicated story because Emmett feels very alone and isolated, but you make it very clear that he has people who don’t just care about him–they love him very much. It’s that inner thing that you can’t control, where your brain does what it wants to do, and it’s never en enough for him. It’s a very interesting contrast where it’s never enough–on numerous levels throughout this book–for Emmett as he goes along. How did you approach that layering of want and need?

Again, it started from personal experience and wanting to lay out a real authentic portrayal of, not only being a fat person, but disordered eating, binge eating–which is something that I’ve experienced–but then digging deeper into “What does that mean emotionally for this person? Why is he drawn towards that? What is what’s the hole he’s trying to fill?” and then extending that to this cannibalism metaphor.

It’s not just about the gross-out horror of eating meat. That is, for him, how he’s seeking revenge on the society that’s hurt him. It’s how he’s taking his power back and he maybe has felt consumed by society for years or also told that “You need to eat less.” He’s told that he should not be consuming, and so, when he comes into his own as a monster, I wanted that to feel like him really taking his power back and becoming a monstrous version of himself, but also a more powerful and fully-realized version of himself.

It’s a metaphor that works on many levels but, as you pointed out, I think intelligently it still doesn’t fill the hole. Nothing does. And it is something that I wanted to explore–it’s not that Emmett doesn’t have love in his life. It’s not that people don’t care for him. But when you grow up in a society that’s feeding you a certain message all the time, force-feeding you this message, that it becomes ingrained in you.

Fat is more than just the weight you carry on your body. It’s how you think of yourself. It’s your identity. He really struggles to break through that right to the very end. Ultimately, it is his inability to do that that is the real tragedy for him.

Is naming the corporation in the book Monstera and the drug itself EmaC-8 (“emaciate”) a nod to the idea that sometimes corporations are a little bald-faced in terms of their intentions from the start, and it’s all hiding in plain view?

Yeah. I think we are very aware as consumers that these corporations are really out for profit. Before the Ozempics of the world started coming out, there had been many weight loss drugs that came onto the market, were super-popular, and then we found out they were really bad for your health.

I don’t think it’s like a new take to say that, “Corporations are trying to do whatever they can to get money or to make a profit.” I really wanted to explore this unique moment that we’re in now where, socially, we’ve created a market for these weight loss drugs in the sense that people are struggling with weight more than ever but also, socially, we continue to demonize people who are overweight and tell them that they’re defective and subhuman and no one will ever want them and they need to change.

By doing so, we create this intense market, this clamor for weight loss drug but at the same time, we’re also telling people or suggesting that people who do use weight loss drugs are not losing weight the right way. They are maybe being a little bit lazy or they’re greedily taking drugs away from the diabetics who really need them. There are still these narratives that suggest that there’s something wrong with fat people, whether it’s because they’re not trying to lose weight or ’cause they’re using drugs to lose weight.

They’re always doing something wrong so the company can call itself Monstera and no one blinks at that but society will always look at the overweight people, the fat people, and paint them to be the monsters. They will paint them to be the villains–the real villains. As you say, it’s right on display. It’s in their name.

Some of the stuff that happens at the end–it’s so obvious who the villain is, and yet, as a society, we want to shrug at those things because it’s expected and find someone else to blame, which, in the case of this book, is the people who struggle most.

You write about food so well in Nothing Tastes As Good. The appeal is very clear. Have you ever done food writing or anything like that, because even the cheapest, shittiest gas station food that’s mentioned in this, the glow about it comes off the page.

I’ve never done food writing. That must just come from my own love of shitty gas station food, fast food, and trying to tap into times when I’ve really struggled with compulsive eating and the emotional comfort that you can get from it in those moments, treating it like a drug. In my experience, that’s how it’s felt sometimes, but there’s also this psychological element. There’s a chemical need for it.

And then, in the case of a sugar addiction, there’s also this psychological pull and just trying to capture what is drawing him to the food? It’s not just the ingredients; it’s how it makes him feel. And yeah, I guess that’s what’s coming through.

Nothing Tastes As Good has a very cinematic quality to it. You alluded to Stephen King’s Thinner. And I see that The Substance has been mentioned. Were there other cinematic things that led you to craft it? I mean this in the most complimentary way, but it does read like a novelization of a script, in that I can picture certain actors and places in this very clearly.

I didn’t have a lot of cinematic influences in mind while writing it. The only one that was really present was there’s a climactic scene in a tower, and I thought of Frankenstein and his tower with the villagers storming the tower to try to get the monster.

I do think my style is very much influenced by cinema ’cause before I was a reader, I was a movie obsessive. I watched movies constantly as a kid, so I think that’s written into my storytelling style. I do tend to write in quite short chapters that feel like scenes out of a movie and that’s always moving to a new location. It’s just how I see stories play out in my head.

I’m not surprised that it reads like a screenplay in some ways, but no, and The Substance is a great comparison for it, but I actually was writing or had written the book when that movie came out. I remember seeing the trailer and thinking, “Oh no, like this is gonna be a little bit similar. People will think that I’m like just doing a new version of The Substance.”

I was concerned about that, but then I saw the movie, and it was so brilliant and doing its own thing, and now it feels like a great compliment for this book to be likened to that movie at all. They do share some thematic DNA, and I do appreciate that.

Luke Dumas’ Nothing Tastes As Good is out Tuesday, March 31, from Atria Books.