Horror Fiction Book Review – “Tender is the Flesh,” by Augustina Bazterrica

This book is some sick shit. It’s possibly the most fucked-up book I’ve ever read…..And I mean that in the best way possible.

Warning: Minor Spoilers (and stomach churning discussion of cannibalism) below:

Wrapping up RayDorl.com’s inaugural Spooktacular October is Augustina Bazterrica’s “Tender is the Flesh.” I wasn’t familiar with this author, but she’s Argentine horror writer who combines social satire¹ with nauseatingly extreme horror.

And this one is a doozy. It takes place in the near future, where a supposed virus has made all animal life contaminated and poisonous to humans (the book is never quite clear whether this virus is real, or made up by the government to further its nefarious goal of population control).

So instead of eating animals, humans eat other humans–most of them bred and kept in captivity for this purpose–for their protein needs. Human flesh is called, euphemistically, “special meat” and sold in butcher shops the way animal meat is in our society.

Bazterrica doesn’t shy away from the nitty gritty of this high concept premise. In fact she seems to revel in it, following our “protagonist” (anti-hero might be a better term) Marcos Tejo, who is the “right hand man” to the owner of a meat processing plant. Marcos is, at the beginning of the book, a vegetarian, having given up “special meat” after the death of his infant child. But Marcos remains enmeshed in the world of processing “special meat,” and through his work day we get a glimpse into this nightmarish world, as he visits breeding pens, the slaughterhouse, a tannery, butcher shops, reservations where “special meat” can be hunted for sport and food, and a laboratory where experiments are performed on humans to better understand their limits.

The first fifty or so pages are probably the strongest (and the most horrifying) of the book, where Bazterrica engages in world building as Marcos makes his “rounds.” Here’s an example, where he visits a butcher shop owned by the proprietress (and his former lover) Spanel:

Here’s another scene, where Marcos visits the reservation where humans are hunted for food:

As the book goes on, we learn more about Marcos and his motivations. He has a father with dementia who is in a memory unit. His wife left him after the death of their infant son. And he has a strained relationship with his (terrible) sister and her (awful) children. But since this all takes place in a world in which cannibalism and industrial slaughter of humans for “special meat” has been normalized, these domestic concerns are all tinged by the nightmarish world Bazterrica has created. Marcos worries that his father’s corpse will be sold off to be eaten by “scavengers,” humans that are too poor to buy “special meat” and will eat any corpse available to them. Marcos is given–as a “gift” by a client–a woman who was bred for slaughter, and in the absence of his wife slowly begins to fall in love with her, a crime punishable by consignment to the municipal slaughterhouse. And his sister tries to call in a favor so she can buy a “domestic head,” or a human to be eaten that is kept in a household.

If this all sounds hideous and disgusting, it is. I had to take a break during one scene that depicts–in extreme and gruesome detail– the processing line at Marcos’s slaughterhouse, which Bazterrica has confirmed in interviews is based on actual factory farming methods. But Bazterrica–a committed vegetarian–has a point to all of this, condemning not only industrial meat production, but also capitalism and misogynistic reproductive policies.

It’s also jarringly compelling to read. Bazterrica has a knack for descriptive language–not only of the horrors of industrial “special meat” production, breeding, and retailing. But also of the humans that are part of this world. One character’s laugh is described as sounding “like a rat scratching at the walls.” Marcos looks at another character and “knows that the entity, whatever it is that’s in there, scratching at the man’s skin from the inside, wants to howl and slice through the air with a sharp, cutting wail.” In these demonic portrayals, Bazterrica condemns everyone who is part of this system.

All and all a sick book and not for the faint of heart. But it is also thought-provoking, compelling, and extremely well written. This was an excellent choice for the final book in my inaugural Spooktacular October Horror Review series!

1. I mean “satire” in the tradition of Jonathan Swift; not Weird Al Yankovich. ↩︎