This Vicious Hunger is a gothic romantic fantasy novel written by Francesca May, published by Orbit Books. A delicious and tense story built around a slow-burn sapphic romance that is used as the way to explore hunger and toxicity in the literal and metaphorical sense, analyzing to which point a relationship might just become selfishness, and giving us a broader picture over academia, the price of success and the role of women over a fundamentally masculine environment.

Thora, daughter of an undertaker and recently widowed, is at the mercy of her in-laws; salvation comes in the form of an invitation to study at a prestigious university with a renowned botanist and medical researcher, friend of her father. She's promptly swept into the world of academia, a woman in a male-dominated world; and in the garden outside her window she discovers a strange woman, Olea, who lives inside. A moment that marks the start of a fight between her determination to get academic success and the lustful friendship she develops towards Olea; desires that seem to go in opposite directions, and that she must navigate.

May managed to create a novel that is part gothic fantasy/horror and part a study of a character: Thora is a fascinating character to follow; her transformation as her bond with Olea is developed and how toxic it becomes mimics a bit the amount of toxins she's receiving from the own garden; but at the end, what she's showing is her own nature, a person who refuses to fit into the role others prepared for her.
The romance between both characters is lush and intoxicating, pretty much fitting into what you could expect from gothic horror; Olea is sometimes the opposite of what Thora represents, but is needed for the growth of our character.

Don't go expecting a straightforward story, as May takes a sweet time to put all in motion; the plot is clearly divided into two parts, marked by Thora's change. The atmosphere is sublime, pretty much capturing all the tension until it needs to be released; the academia and botanic aspects create a great setting for our main plot to be developed.

This Vicious Hunger is a really enjoyable novel, especially if you are looking for a gothic atmosphere that serves as the setting for a slowburn sapphic romantic that shows the most toxic aspects of the relationships (certainly the most unhinged). A must read if you love the genre!