The Secret Dinner
Raphael Montes built a cannibal farce out of a Rio rent hike, and The Secret Dinner is meaner and funnier than that premise has any right to be. Four broke students start cooking for the city's richest appetites, and Zoe Perry's translation keeps the Brazilian class satire sharp enough to cut. Horror readers will know within twenty pages whether they can stay.
From the review
Raphael Montes never blinks. The Secret Dinner is a horror novel about high-end cannibalism, and the easy version of that book coasts on shock. This one runs on bookkeeping. Four friends leave rural Brazil for an apartment in Copacabana, the rent climbs, and the plan they land on gets discussed like any other small business: sourcing, pricing, repeat customers. The early chapters are funny because everyone sounds so reasonable. Then they stop being funny, and nobody inside the book seems to register the moment it happened. Dante narrates, which is the novel's smartest structural move and its meanest. He is the sensible one, the explainer, and Montes lets him hold that register long past the point where it should have cracked. You start auditing his sentences. A clause about what a friend had coming, a shrug about what the clients wanted, and before long you are reading his self-justifications the way a prosecutor reads a deposition. The escalation is patient. Each dinner raises the price and drops the floor, and the reveals are timed so you sit about half a chapter ahead of the four of them, which is the worst seat in the house.
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