Let me start by saying, as a life long fan, I have read and watched a LOT of horror and when you do that, you get to a point where you think you can't be surprised or shocked by much. Oh sure, some things might gross me out now and then, and there are things like The Terrifier that I simply don't care for because it is just mindless slaughter, usually of women, in the nastiest ways possible. Blood and guts come with the territory and I generally don't mind them as long as they serve the story or perhaps are just kind of sadistically fun.
Tender is the Flesh, by Argentine novelist Agustina Bazterrica and translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses, is as dark, violent, disturbing, and hauntingly brilliant as anything I've read in years, a short, tight novel that is a dystopian satire, a hellish trip through a two hundred page House of Horrors with a gut-punch of an ending that leaves a reader wondering, "What the hell just happened?"
The novel takes place in a not-too-distant future in which a deadly virus has killed all animals or necessitated them being killed. To survive, humanity has taken to wholesale, industrialized cannibalism. Humans, called Head or sometimes just meat, are bred, raised, and slaughtered for consumption. If you think the novel doesn't go into agonizing detail on how all this is done, you'd be wrong.
The story follows Marcos, a high-ranking official at a slaughterhouse, a man who, while he takes care of an ailing father, navigates his grief over the death of his son and the subsequent mental breakdown of his wife, seems to be questioning the morality of the "Transition," as the move to eat humans has been called. Marcos is given a FGP (First Generation Pure) female as a gift, presumably to slaughter, and as you might suspect, Marcos starts to grow close to her, seeming to question his place in the world even more.
Bazterrica's prose is simple and matter-of-fact in its description of the brutality, which in a way makes some of the scenes even worse. Horror authors often inject a little bit of guilty humor or cute tongue-in-cheekiness in some of their more brutal scenes as if to take some of the edge off, but Bazterrica lays it out raw and unfiltered, which in the end, makes many of the scenes more shocking and harder to read. If you're getting the idea that this book isn't for the faint of heart, you'd be right. I've been told by many people over the years they had to put down a Stephen King or Dean Koontz book because it disturbed them, and if that's true, then Tender is the Flesh would probably make them swear off reading for a year.
The novel is beautifully crafted in its brutal simplicity and understated prose. Bazterrica casts a haunted protagonist in Marcos and a chilling cast of characters that nonchalantly talk about slaughtering a human being for dinner as if they were talking about one of those pre-roasted chickens from Costco. She accomplishes a lot in a short novel, profiling a middle-aged man estranged from his wife, a man with no relationship with his sister, and a man whose father is suffering from dementia and dying, all set against the backdrop of human slaughterhouses, starving scavengers who roam the countryside looking for someone to murder and munch on, and dinner parties that serve tongues, fingers, even genitals.
If there is a point to it all, it is a little hard to ascertain. Is this satire and if so, what is it satirizing? The meat industry? Untrustworthy Big Government (the novel hints repeatedly that the virus may never have existed and if that is true, she never tells us why that might have been the case)? The narrow distinction between us and animals? If you make it to the end, you may not have a theory either. Maybe it is all of the above.
I would hesitate to recommend Tender is the Flesh in the way I would your average NYT Bestseller unless I knew my audience. I would say, however, that it represents a fresh take (pun unintended) on one of mankind's oldest and most serious taboos, showcases a startling literary voice, and is a good example of what great horror can be, what the best horror is: scary because if not quite true, it could be.
Maybe just hold off the meat while you're reading it. Trust me.
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