“Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”
In this dystopia, people eat people. Grocery stores serve packaged human, and family prayers circle a roasting man on a spit. Nutrition, economy, politics and ethics surround the worldwide heartbeat of state-sanctioned cannibalism. After a disease made animal meat inedible, the mysterious transition began, allowing “ethical” consumption of meat through lab-modified humans raised in farms to be slaughtered for the plate. This book has the sort of plot that can overshadow the writing itself.
“The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus”
Agustina Bazterrica wrote “Tender is the Flesh,” which became a bestseller in Argentina in 2021. Its praise floated to the states, primarily because of the shocking premise. It follows Marcos, a worker at a human slaughterhouse, and brings us through the narrative of his world in graphic detail. I would say it makes your skin crawl, but it also makes you all too aware of the skin you do have. Skin, flesh, tendons, putrid muscle, rotting corpses— the words in every paragraph paint a squeamish picture. Marcos walks the reader through his own tumultuous personal life, making him an empathic character even through his moral corruption. Although, he makes it clear- there is no morality with the masses.
“He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one”
This book is not one you read with a pen in hand. It is read to savor the bitter aftertaste. While reading this, I did not think it was necessarily as fantastic as it was made out to be. At times, it just felt like torture porn with vague stabs to this abstraction of society. Other pages felt self gratifying. Until I got to the ending.
“After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”
It does not tie itself into a neatly-arranged bow and there is no sigh of relief. The nausea of the pages turns from bodily discomfort to guilt, moral sin and the outrageous urge to try vegetarianism for a while.
“[…] she screams as if the world didn’t exist, she screams as if words had split in two and lost all meaning, she screams as if beneath this hell there was another hell, one from which she didn’t want to escape.”
For the horror reader, the excruciating detail of dressing human flesh and screams of pain and all of that sick stuff “Terrifier” fans like will please the unsettled. For those who get a kick out of political dystopias or dog-eat-dog philosophies, “Tender is the Flesh” will satisfy that craving. But mostly, it will make a reader reconsider their own consumption of meat. The unfortunate part of this plot is that the horrors of a fake human slaughterhouse are picked from our very real meat processing plants in our world. Carnivores beware, vegans steer clear.
