His father used to own a tannery, but it was sold after the Transition, and in recognition of the family’s history, Marcos has been given an administrative job at the Krieg Processing Plant. Our protagonist, Marcos, works in an abattoir. Bazterrica has written a horror fable about slaughtering humans like animals, sure, but she’s also written a critique of language as a tool for control: it’s not just about what is said and not said by politicians and the media, but about who even has the permission or the right to speak, and the implications of speech for-quite literally-our humanity. Cannibalism in this book is what Adam Roberts in his History of Science Fiction calls a novum (he takes the word from scholar Darko Suvin): one single new idea or change to the way society works that an author uses to illuminate and comment upon other, usually wider, phenomena. Language, vocabulary and speech are Bazterrica’s concerns just as much as the obvious capitalist metaphor of consuming human bodies in fact, I would argue, more so. Why, the casual reader might think, should we believe that would work? As Bazterrica’s sickeningly straightforward novel demonstrates, there are two reasons why it might: first of all, we already have the infrastructure in place for large-scale breeding, slaughter and processing of carcasses secondly, people can and will get used to almost anything if it’s presented to them using the right words. It’s an arguable premise: civilization, believing that all animals contain (or could contain) a virus deadly to humans, makes the Transition and begins to eat factory-farmed human meat. also, content note/trigger warning for: implied violence against children, violence against women, violence against animals, rape, murder, eugenics, cannibalism~~ The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

Tenders the flesh