A Certain Hunger

Dorothy Daniels shares similarities with characters like Annie Wilks, from Stephen King’s Misery, and Hannibal Lecter, from Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, in that she is a murderer who shows little remorse and is stated to have a psychiatric disability. Dorothy, like these other characters, can invoke a feeling of guilt or sympathy through her charisma, particularly when presented in the mixed first- and second-person point of view, choosing to address the reader directly.

Though serial killers are frequently explored in contemporary fiction, they are less often explored as women killers. Summers, via Dorothy, proposes that women are just as likely to be serial killers as men, but they may be more able to feign a persona of normalcy; thus, their womanhood aids in their crimes. Dorothy believes that people are more likely to assume danger from a man than a woman because people are predisposed to see good, nurturing, and maternal instincts in women regardless of any evidence to the contrary. In this sense, the text is a feminist exploration of women’s abilities to do anything men can do, including committing murder.

Dorothy believes that because women are often prey for men, women wish they could take revenge on their attackers, but such revenge is not socially acceptable.