This horror novel takes place in the not so distant future where a virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. In response, the governments transitioned their populations to eating 'special meat' (human meat). The protagonist of the story - Marcos - works in the slaughterhouse and processing plant for one of the larger corporations. Despite his very lucrative position, he's recently undergone some personal tragedy in his life and finds himself unsure of how to move forward. Then, he's given a gift of a very high quality human and as he's trying to figure out what to do with this gift, he starts to treat her like a human being - an action that has ramifications through the rest of his life.
Translation by Sarah Moses
TW/CW: cannibalism, death of a child, pregnancy, animal abuse, animal death
I found this story to have a lot of layers and really interesting elements to it, but to me it was first and foremost a horror novel. I found it to be a really interesting mix of gore and almost psychological horror and it does not ease the reader into the story. From page 1 we are immediately dropped into this new world and are forced to face the brutal realities of this world. The gore elements are certainly present on page, but they were given in an almost clinical manner. While reading the sections that were explaining the different areas of the facility, I was having flashbacks to reading excerpts of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 8th grade social studies. I really liked the choice to have the gore be present but not overwhelming. The processing plant and holding facilities that were described in this book are very accurate to current day practices for animals so I think that made the actions of these characters hit a little closer to home than some readers may be comfortable with. I think this way of framing the cannibalism/gore elements also helped strengthen the psychological horror elements as well for both the reader and Marcos.
I thought Marcos's character was a really interesting lens for the reader to see this world through. He's certainly in the middle of the production and he sees the violence and death on a regular basis. However, he has recently become a vegetarian and we see his inner voice struggling with some aspects of his job. We see through his POV that other characters seem to fall into one of two camps - 1: the people who know where this meat comes from but since it is cut up nice in a butcher shop, they try to put the origin out of their minds or 2: the ones who delight in the legal killing of other humans. While I was reading, there were a few times where I would sort of forget that the book is about farming humans and then there would be a new scene where that aspect was right front and center and it would almost surprise me all over again. We see Marcos going through a sort of similar loop where he really dislikes and is almost disgusted by his job but on the other hand, it is a very prestigious position and when he's going out delivering and gathering orders around the area it is easy to forget that he's dealing with people and not pigs or cows. That looping realization and re-realization really managed to get under my skin a bit and I think it upped the psychological impact of the overall story.
The one part of this story that I didn't love was the pacing. This was originally written in Spanish and then translated into English so this might just be a difference in types of story telling common in the two languages. I found this book to be very heavy on the telling the reader what is going on and not showing. There was a lot of almost factual explanation of what Marcos was doing. There was a lot of "Marcos went here and talked to this person about X and then went over there and talked to another person about Y" type of scenes and it made the pacing at times go really quickly but other times seemed to slow it down. In the storytelling tradition that I'm used to, this sort of 'telling' the reader comes across as very passive and I personally find it most impactful when we need to get from point A to point B quickly but we still need that journey on page. Leaving out a lot of the setting description and actual conversation off the page lets us get through a lot of plot points fairly quickly, but it leaves me struggling to fill in the details and settle into the story. I noticed it pretty quickly in the beginning of the story but that made sense to me since we were getting settled in this new world and we needed a lot of this set-up information as soon as possible. However, this narrative style didn't really change in the course of the book and, for me, this lead me to be more distanced from the book that I normally like and left me a little disconnected by the end. I don't know if this narrative style was a specific choice in order to distance the reader from the story or if this was just a difference in storytelling and story structure traditions.
Finally, I absolutely loved the ending but I fully acknowledge that not everyone will. From a structural view, the ending came very quickly and ended almost abruptly. I saw a few reviews that made a comment along the lines that it felt like the book was missing one more chapter where we could see the final outcome. Personally, I usually do like a somewhat lengthy come down after a story's climax but in this case, it really felt like the ending mirrored the beginning. In the beginning of the story, it felt like the reader was just dropped into this world that was already fully functioning and we observe the actions of these characters. Then, at the end, we basically get picked back up out of the story just as quickly as we were dropped into it. Then, the subject matter of the ending is also something I could see readers feeling very strongly about. I really enjoyed the turn the ending took and I was glad it didn't go in the direction I thought it was going. I can't really give more details because of spoilers, but I'll just say that I felt the ending we got stayed true to the characters and the world building that we'd seen over the previous 200 pages and that made the ending feel really 'right' to me. There are so many different branches this story could have taken, but I really admire the decision to keep the story on the human level by focusing on Marcos and the other workers at the processing facility. The ending, similarly, keeps the focus on the core human element of the story and I think it really hit a home run with it.
Overall, I really enjoyed this story and highly recommend you give it a try if you are even the faintest bit interested in it. I really don't think a story about factory farming human meat is going to be for everyone (obviously) but I think this is a really powerful novel and it has some great horror elements that are really punchy without being overdone. As I read more horror books, I'm finding I really enjoy the stories that focus on the humanity within the horror and how difficult some of these situations can be to manage.
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