Guest post written by With Regrets author Lee Kelly
Lee Kelly is the author of City of Savages, a Publishers Weekly “Best of Spring 2015” pick and a VOYA Magazine “Perfect Ten” selection, A Criminal Magic, which was optioned and developed for a television series by Warner Bros., The Antiquity Affair, co-written with Jennifer Thorne, and With Regrets. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Gingerbread House, Orca, and Tor.com, among other publications, and she holds her MFA degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. An entertainment lawyer by trade, Lee has practiced law in Los Angeles and New York. She currently lives with her husband and two children in New Jersey, where you’ll find them engaged in one adventure or another.
With Regrets is out now and features a suburban drama wrapped in a 24-hour survival story at the end of the world.
There’s often great care taken in planning a dinner party. Special dishware, fancy crystal, place settings, and arrangements (should couples be seated together or apart?). The host might spend days, even weeks, preparing before the guests sweep in and the party is underway: the food served, the wine poured, the conversation ignited.
In real life, these parties tend to go according to plan, maybe with a few hiccups or low-level drama, but nothing that a glass of wine or a cocktail can’t fix. In fiction, too, most dinner scene complications are confined to interpersonal conflict, like a marital spat, or family disagreement. Every so often, though, a book, film, or TV series will feature a dinner that goes completely off the rails; the party, devolving into total chaos—and boy can these sequences be equally riveting and horrific to witness.
My latest genre-blending novel, With Regrets, features such a dinner, an evening when a group of friends and frenemies gathers for an adults-only dinner party at their neighbor’s house, and a world-altering, cataclysmic event occurs during the first course. Trapped without their kids and inside their host’s home, the group is forced to launch into survival mode, grabbing supplies to take shelter in the wine cellar. But everyone has very different opinions about the best plan to get home to their children . . . and as the night unfolds, some of the secrets the guests are keeping prove just as dangerous as the threats outside.
Here are some of my favorite dinner parties gone wrong, from novels to movies to television.
The Dinner Guests by Kiersten Modglin
Modglin’s inventive novel reimagines a dinner party as a malicious escape room, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. A quaint neighborhood’s mysterious new residents invite a group of longtime friends over for a dinner party. Before the first course is served, however, these guests realize they’re in for a lot more than a fancy meal. What follows is a calculated game seemingly designed for psychological torment: the group’s friendships are tested, hidden secrets are revealed, and as the night continues, it becomes evident that not every partygoer is going to make it home.
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Hendrix’s genre-blending story takes place in a South Carolina town over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of this novel is Patricia Campbell, a Southern homemaker who begins to suspect that her new, charming, enigmatic neighbor is a vampire, and attempts to convince her neighbors of the truth. During a dinner party, while Patricia is preoccupied wining and dining, her undead nemesis strikes back by commanding a horde of rats to viciously attack Patricia’s mother-in-law. Note: This one’s not for the faint of heart, as some of the more brutal sequences in this novel still haunt my nightmares.
The Menu (Film)
A young couple and ten other dinner guests journey to an exclusive, remote, farm-to-table restaurant. . . and get a lot more than an exquisite multi-course meal. Things start well enough with a tour of the restaurant’s private twelve-acre island, where its celebrated chef and support staff live and work. The night gets decidedly weirder when the guests are told that they aren’t entitled to bread with their bread plates, and when deconstructed tacos show up with incriminating pictures of the guests lasered onto the tortillas. The dinner really turns the corner at the fourth course, a performative intermezzo ominously and rightfully called “The Mess”. A blistering commentary on class, consumerism, art, and the pursuit of perfection.
Coherence (Film)
A group of friends convene for dinner on a night when a rare comet is passing Earth, a celestial event rumored to cause disorientation and other catastrophic effects. Sure enough, moments into dinner, the power goes out and cell service drops. When some of the guests go outside to investigate, they find a single, eerie, illuminated house. I found the puzzle at the heart of Coherence to be exhilarating in its originality, so I don’t want to spoil: Suffice it to say the film veers firmly into science fiction territory, employing a type of multiverse construct to unsettling and mind-blowing effect.
The Umbrella Academy (TV series, Season 2, Episode 6: “A Light Supper”)
Regular family dinners can be tumultuous enough, but in a show where every sibling has a superpower, meals can easily reach a new level of chaos. In The Umbrella Academy, a cheeky, time-traveling adventure series, a crew of adopted heroes and antiheroes dine with a younger version of their father, to convince him to make the right choices, preserve their existence, and save the world. The dinner becomes a complete spectacle when the siblings attempt to prove to their aloof, withholding patriarch why they’re worthy (e.g., time-jumping, possession, knife-throwing, mind control), and just like in the future, fail to gain his respect or approval.
Succession (TV series, Season 2, Episode 3: “Hunting”)
Logan Roy, patriarch of HBO’s smash TV series Succession and founder of Waystar RoyCo, technically has no supernatural abilities, but most viewers would contend his sheer viciousness is legendary. Logan’s sadism is on full display in “Hunting,” a posh corporate retreat dinner that devolves into performative humiliation when Logan attempts to suss out who among his dinner guests betrayed him by leaking classified information. His method for doing so: “Boar on the Floor,” a game that requires his employees to grunt like pigs and grovel as Logan pelts them with sausages. Dinner theater at its best and very worst.
