Al-Rawi defines the ghoul as a male or female creature “with fangs and cloven feet, who were thought to appear in different shapes, to travellers, in the wilderness. In “ The Arabic Ghoul and its Western Transformation,” Ahmed K.

Historically, the origin of the ghoul derives from ancient Arabic culture.

While one label paints Maren and Lee as provocative predators, the other affords them the generosity of being seen as casualties of a terrible affliction. But when you look at the histories of ghouls and cannibals, aligning Maren and Lee with the latter begins to feel more revolting than revelatory. “This change resolves the unhappy catch-22 of pairing a girl who eats anyone who shows her affection with a boy who can only eat people he despises.” For the most part-especially when it comes to the film’s revised ending-this decision to root Maren and Lee’s condition in cannibalism rather than ghoulishness works. “ has tweaked the ‘rules’ of eating so that Maren’s undeniable craving is not supernatural in nature, meaning that the eaters in the film are cannibals,” DeAngelis says. Instead, when Maren and Lee eat, a body is always left over. Gone is their immediate ability to devour their victims whole. In Kajganich’s film, Maren and Lee are no longer ghoulish in nature. However, the specifics of Maren and Lee’s condition have been altered considerably: while DeAngelis considered her characters “ghouls,” the film has been heavily marketed as “a cannibal love story.” The film version of Bones and All has some marked differences from DeAngelis’s novel, but the heart of the story remains intact. DeAngelis’s book has recently been adapted for the screen by Luca Guadagnino, the director of the Academy Award winning film Call Me by Your Name (2017) and the recent horror remake of Dario Argento’s giallo masterpiece, Suspiria (2018). When her mother abandons her, Maren is forced to try and navigate the world alone, until she meets a young man named Lee who also happens to share her same cravings, and the two embark on a road trip across America as they attempt to understand their place in the world. This thing Maren does is unacceptable, and yet, for her at least, it is always inescapable. She was simply born this way, drawn to eat those who crave her, chomping them up, bones and all, until their bodies become a part of her own. Always, they seal their own fates: it is their wanting that brings about their deaths. As she grows, those she consumes are typically boys, then men.

So begins Camille DeAngelis’s novel, Bones and All, about a young girl named Maren who is cursed with the volatile compulsion to eat anyone who desires her. That will come later-the devouring whole-when she’s matured enough to separate her actions from her ethics. She’s a baby when she does it, older than six months because she has teeth, but not old enough to swallow the bones just yet. The first person Maren eats is her babysitter.

Book bones and all