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Summary
Chapters 11-12
Chapter 11
Reunited, Maren and Lee spend some time camping in a national park. When their car breaks down, they hitchhike with a girl named Kerri-Ann Watt, an incoming senior at the University of Madison-Wisconsin who flirts with Lee and ignores Maren. When they arrive on campus, they help Kerri-Ann move her belongings into a dorm room. At night, Kerri-Ann invited Lee to spend the night in her dorm, telling Maren to sleep in a common room. When campus security questions Maren, she tells them that she is a guest of Kerri-Ann. However, when the security officer questions Kerri-Ann, she denies that she knows Maren. The security officer orders Maren to follow her to the campus police station, but Maren runs off instead and sleeps outside. In the morning, Lee finds her and apologizes, claiming that he didn’t realize that Kerri-Ann was such a cruel person. Maren asks him to fetch her backpack from Kerri-Ann’s room and Lee insists that there is no need to be sneaky, as he has already eaten Kerri-Ann.
Maren and Lee get used to life on the college campus, sleeping in Kerri-Ann’s dorm and using her ID card to access the library. One day, at the library, she finds the severed tail of Mrs. Harmon’s cat and knows that Sully has followed her yet again. Discarding the tail in a garbage bin, she returns to the dormitory, where she encounters Sully in a hallway. He threatens her with a knife and forces her into the dorm room, where he threatens to kill and eat her. However, she is able to disarm him as Lee returns to the dorm. He orders her to go to the bathrooms while he eats Sully. Afterwards, they go through his things, finding Mrs. Harmon’s jewelry, some cash, and a long rope composed of the hair of his victims. They sip from his flask of whiskey and grow tipsy. That night, Lee undresses in front of Maren and she appreciates his muscular body. Lying next to her, he ignores her warnings and begins to kiss her while her stomach grumbles.
Chapter 12
When Maren awakens the next morning, she sees that Lee is gone and knows that she ate him. Though she is sad that he is gone, she feels that he offered herself to him willingly. She continues to live at the university, though one day she sees a note for Kerri-Ann left on the door and realizes that she cannot stay there much longer. She flirts with a handsome student she meets in the library named Jason, who is double majoring in archaeology and anthropology. She also meets a helpful though unattractive PhD student in Library Sciences named Wayne, who has noticed that Maren has been helping to place books back in their correct spots on the shelves and offers her a job, which she is grateful for. Using the last of her cash, she rents out a room from a local woman named Mrs. Clipper. As she spends more time in the library, she continues to flirt with Jason, altering her style of dress in order to be more attractive to him. One day, in the stacks of the library, she seduces Jason. She warns him in a matter-of-fact manner that she will kill and consume him, starting with his neck and then moving onto the rest of his body, though she knows that he will not believe her. As she finally admits to herself that she does not want him to believe her, she kisses him on the throat.
Analysis
The final chapters of the novel take place on a college campus, an environment in which Maren thrives. Because there are so many people on a college campus, from diverse backgrounds and walks of life, Maren is able to fit in without being detected by others. She spends a good deal of time in the campus library, reading about cannibalistic practices from around the world. Sully’s arrival almost threatens the life she has built for herself at the university. However, at this point in the novel both Maren and Sully have changed. Maren has grown more confident, mature, and self-assured. From her new perspective, Sully seems almost pathetic to her, a dangerous but ultimately absurd old man. She wonders to herself how she was ever able to think of him as wise and kind when his sinister and crazed nature is now so clear to her. The revelation of Sully’s true nature is one of many instances in the novel in which first appearances are deceiving. Now that she knows the truth about him, Maren is able to see through his deceptions.
Sully himself has deteriorated physically since Maren struck him in the head with the statuette. He has an ugly, unhealed wound, less hair, and admits that he often experiences debilitating confusion and pain. When he brags that he has already consumed Lee, Maren immediately intuits that he is lying, as he is not strong enough to have done so. Maren holds her own against Sully until Lee arrives. At this point in the story, the balance of power has shifted considerably. Lee easily overpowers a terrified Sully, who attempts in vain to talk his way out of the situation. While he once represented a dire threat to Maren and Lee, his death is ultimately a pathetic one. As they examine the long rope of hair collected from his victims, Maren realizes how obvious Sully’s lies were. Previously, he claimed to only eat victims who are already deceased, but if that were true, she realizes, then most of the hair in the rope would be white or gray.
Maren’s consumption of Lee is the narrative climax of the novel, though Maren describes it only briefly and indirectly. She believes that Lee understood what was going to happen to him when he lay down next to her, and that he “let” her do so. By physically embracing her despite the obvious risk, she feels that Lee has purified her, absolving her of her feelings of guilt and shame. Though she misses Lee and wishes that he hadn’t allowed her to eat him, she recognizes that, in some sense, this was the inevitable and necessary culmination of their relationship. His death can be understood in various ways–as a self-sacrifice, an act of suicide, or perhaps even as the highest expression of love possible for two “eaters.” Throughout the novel, cannibalism and sexual intimacy have been closely connected. In allowing Maren to consume him, he has given himself to her completely.
After Lee’s death, Maren’s attitudes change considerably. No longer feeling fear and guilt over her condition, Maren begins to accept and even embrace her cannibal nature. She suspects that one of the other young women living in her building is an eater, and wonders if there are eaters who are willing to consume others, like Travis, upon request, in the manner of a sex-worker. Throughout the course of the story, Maren has avoided romance and intimacy due to the risk of triggering her cannibalistic hunger. Now, however, she actively seduces a handsome student at the university, dressing in a manner that she thinks will be attractive to him and brazenly seducing him in the stacks of the library. Amazed by her forwardness, he asks her if she is a “succubus”–a feminine demon from folklore and mythology who seduces her male victims. Though Maren does not respond to his question before presumably consuming him, her actions suggest that she has embraced her new persona as a succubus-like figure.
