Dorley Hall's Evil Twin: A Review Of "A Hungry Light"

Horror has never really been my genre. Fiction, in general, has never been my genre. So I might be the wrong person to describe this book, but I’m going to try it anyway.

Returning readers might have read by review of Victoria Zeller’s One of the Boys, a fantastic book that I easily recommend. Around that time, I saw that it had made it onto The Transfeminine Review’s shortlist for best fiction in 2025, and, seeing that I already liked one finalist and am trying to broaden my media horizons, it felt prudent to look.

One of those was Zin Nabelle’s A Hungry Light, a 700ish page horror novel with “deification torture basement” on the bottom of the cover page. It’s really hard to discuss the synopsis of the book without spoilers, but I will do my best. Be warned, the book’s itch.io page contains a number of content warnings. Heed those warnings. This book is very heavy and might not be suitable to most people. Myself included, quite honestly.

Spoilers and heavy content below.

A Hungry Light’s first pages are of a kidnapping. Emotional reprieve is in desperately short supply in this book, so sure as fuck it won’t give any at the start. The book follows, “Mike”, the kidnapping victim, as he is brought into an undisclosed basement somewhere and barely kept alive by his captors. Mike is given the barest survival rations, a good-cop bad-cop routine from hell, slashes across the back, and the reason for his capture:

His jailor thinks he’s a reincarnated goddess.

If you’re familiar with the world of trans basement transformation fiction, as I am, then the relationship to Alyson Greaves’ Sisters of Dorley is apparent. The Dorley series follows “Stef”, a closeted trans girl who is investigating the disappearance of her friend, leading her to a university dormitory where miscreant boys are given a new lease on life as, well, not always trans women per se, but feminized. It’s a series that I wouldn’t know how to explain to cis people, but I would recommend it for having a poignant look at cycles of abuse, being able to reform oneself, trying to belong in your body when you don’t have a choice in the matter, and keeping the internal dynamics of an out-group hidden from people who could not understand. It’s a good read, and one I can recommend.

A Hungry Light is about bringing that setting to its worst places. Literally. “Mike”’s jailor, Athame, and her brother/partner in crime Baz, believe they have found the vessel for their reincarnated occult goddess, and that upon Mike’s successful transformation, they can present the goddess to their church as proof of their belief where others wavered. It’s not exactly sanctioned, however. The methods I described above are where the book starts. Things get worse. A lot worse. Moments of happiness or relief are like gold, almost as fantastical as the book’s magical elements.

Mike is put through this process (and goes by Lucy/Lucielle as it goes along) through practices ranging from flatly unsafe (sharing needles at Athame’s coercion) to unsafe and violent. She begins to grow horns and develop the capacity to use rays of light from her mind like wires, controlling the people and environment around her. Often out of desperation, but sometimes from ingenuity. Nabelle also uses a color-coding system in the text to describe different types of light and their users. For my qualms about the book, the use of technical devices, in the story itself and the writing of it, is great. The content they are in service of, however…

Which I think gets me to the part of the review that has put me off for literal months. I don’t know how to appropriately discuss a book like this that has graphic depictions of not just sex, or violence, but often both at the same time. And by people whose relationships are often in tension. All of the relief, happiness, contentedness, is returned with repudiated, disproportionate violence.

The most graphic scene in the book takes place after Lucy and Athame reach a short, sweet detente. I will not describe it here. It’s horrifying, and I felt like I had to make it through the book out of some sense of obligation. Beyond my squeamishness at the violence, I held on and tore through the pages of this book out of a sense of hope that Lucy might be able to escape the evil put upon her. Of course, this is not a book about escape, or coming through the other side of unspeakable horror with some kind of happy ending. Lucy is permitted catharsis, but never enough. She nearly murders Athame. When she is finally brought to the church, she is able to hold the levers of power briefly before being manipulated and brought low by another abuser. That is met with the full weight of Lucy’s — Lucifer’s — newfound sadistic rage. In the end, though, it isn’t enough to truly escape, rather with a role reversal. She rescues Athame from the burning ruins of the church and the two make some attempt at coexistence, this time with Lucy holding the keys to her captor’s fate, which we don’t get to see.

I’ve had a hard time trying to tease out my feelings about this book, because they essentially come down to one thing: While I can barely make heads or tails of what I think the essential theme or message of A Hungry Light is, it made me viscerally feel the weight of its journey all the way through. Often through its use of extreme situations, but also the ability to break tension. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but there are also some tremendously funny moments in the book too. I can’t truly say whether I think other people ought to read it, but all I really wanted to do was have a reason to talk about the fact that this book was able to break through my apathetic inertia, and so, a thousand words later, that’s what I can say.

Thumbnail art is the book’s cover from https://zinnabelle.itch.io/a-hungry-light, where you can purchase the book. If you weren’t put off by the review, then I’d say give it a try.

I’m not sure yet, but it will not take two months to write. This review kind of took it out of me and I eventually just wanted to get it done. Life’s been hectic but I’ll find something.