Tender Is the Flesh

This book has a wonderfully brutal premise, one it doesn’t compromise in the least while exploring it to the fullest, which is brilliant. So many books cop out, not wanting to upset readers. So many books shape a speculative world to make a point or create drama when the world simply wouldn’t develop that way organically. Not this book.

And it has contemporary relevance. Looking at the MAGA push for a white evangelical dictatorship in America, which will start by capturing 10 million Hispanics (who, as a bonus, are also likely Catholics) and putting them in concentration camps, you can… show more.

There isn’t another horror novel written in the past ten years that scratched at my brain as much as this one. Baztericca’s brilliance lies in her writing a story that no one else has thought of before. The subject matter–humans have run out of animals to eat–seems like an obvious one.

What is striking about the book is that it is told in an almost clinical fashion, observing horror with a detachment that is precise and unemotional. The plot follows one man through the routines of his life, but it’s the world in which he exists that haunts you. By… show more.

Very rarely does a novel truly shock and surprise me – in a good way. This one sure did. 

Argentinian Bazterrica has created a dystopian world in which cannibalism has been normalized after a deadly virus depletes the world’s food sources. Out of this horror, a love story of surprising tenderness emerges between a worker in a human abattoir and one of his intended victims. 

It is a work of true originality that makes you question what it means to live in a world where our humanity is becoming increasingly degraded and commodified.

The last line in this novel will tear your heart out, if you can make it past the grim descriptions of legal human-livestock trade when cannibalism is the only source of meat in this dystopian tale.

The prose is cold and concise, just like the reality it depicts. Our main character, a human-livestock dealer, takes us through this new gritty landscape of people raised for breeding and for consumption after a virus renders all animals toxic to humans. Everything has changed, from not being able to own pets to how we deal with the death of a loved one.

It’s… show more.

I would be remiss if I wrote a list of day-ruining books without at least a little bit of cannibalism. Don’t fret though, because this book is nothing but graphic human slaughter and cannibalism! Absolutely no one in this book is having a good time, and you won’t either! I am a filthy meat eater but this book makes a hell of a case for never touching the stuff again. It’s mildly insufferable of me to say, but there are few things that shock me anymore – and this book made me feel physically ill at multiple points. It’s absolutely… show more.