Hunters & Collectors

The food at the Hunter’s Lodge is impossible to engage with critically. The sausages are presented as a map of the human gullet. Your fish is killed at the table when the waiter pours scalding sauce on it. You eat it, bones and all, and then you smile, because Chef herself is explosive, and has a sonar for displeasure. I haven’t eaten in such an atmosphere of casual menace since I was briefly in jail. John Tamberlain is The Tomahawk, the universe’s most feared food critic – though he himself prefers the term ‘forensic gastronomer’. He’s on a quest, in search of the much-storied Hotel Grand Skies, a secretive and exclusive haven where the rich and famous retreat to bask in perfect seclusion. A place where the waiters know their fish knife from their butter knife, their carotid from their subclavian artery, and are trained to enforce the house rules with brutal efficiency. Blurring the lines between detective story, horror and sci-fi, Hunters & Collectors is a mesmeric trip into the singular imagination of M. Suddain – a freewheeling talent whose poise, invention and sensational sentences have already earned him comparisons to Vonnegut, Pynchon and Douglas Adams.