REVIEW: Tender Is the Flesh (book) by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses

Tender Is the Flesh could be considered a blend of horror and speculative fiction. I bought my copy brand new.

Review:

Marcos is the son of a butcher whose primary focus, right now, is ensuring that his father, who has dementia, gets the care he needs and is respectfully cremated after his death. In this new world, where an infectious virus has supposedly made all animal meat and products poisonous to humans, it's not an easy goal. Meat for human consumption is supposed to come from genetically modified head, bred to age faster, or from First Generation Pure (FGP) head. Special meat isn't supposed to have a name, but it's not unheard of for deceased people to end up sold on the black market, and Marcos wants to make sure that never happens to his father.

We're given detailed descriptions of what Marcos' job at a meat processing plant is like, as he talks to tanners, breeders, and others his company works with, and gives potential new hires a tour of his plant. He can barely stomach this work anymore, to the point that he secretly stops eating meat altogether, and it nearly pushes him over the edge when a client gifts him an FGP female.

In case my description didn't make it clear, this book is set in a world where humans eat other humans. It's very clearly a message about the horrors of the meat  industry, and it might have been more effective if I weren't a genre reader who found myself constantly questioning the world of this book.

It didn't make any sense. Marcos and others strongly suspected that the virus that supposedly made all animal meat poisonous to humans was, in fact, a government conspiracy to reduce overpopulation. There was no believable explanation for why so many believed in the virus to the point of killing all nearby animals, including zoo animals and beloved pets, and the author paid zero attention to the ecological damage that this wholesale slaughter would have caused. Readers were also supposed to believe that the majority of people would accept "special meat" made out of humans as replacement for animal meat. The world-building was vague at best, dependent on the book's frequent on-page cruelties to keep readers from noticing. 

The story was populated by hordes of voiceless victims (literally, in the case of the people bred and raised to be meat - their vocal cords were removed) surrounded by monsters. Reading this was like watching a long string of torture porn-style ads supposedly meant to raise awareness about animal cruelty.

On the plus side, finishing this means that I'm prepared for my next book club meeting, and I'm sure our discussion will be interesting.