She is also a survivor of sexual assault. Here, in our very recognizable world, we meet Natsuki, a misunderstood child who doesn’t quite fit in and believes herself to be an alien. While Tender Is the Flesh takes our society’s id to a dystopian extreme to highlight injustice, Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings portrays cannibalism in a different way. Most chilling is the fact that, in order to make the slaughter easier, these “special meat” beings are bred without voice boxes. As you can imagine, “special meat” is also quite costly, so those who cannot afford it are called Scavengers, depicted as savages waiting by the factories in the hopes of finding scraps. In this alternate world, criminals are also considered fair game in place of prisons, there is the Municipal Slaughterhouse. It is no mistake that the marginalized were the first sacrificial lambs turned lamb chops. But this dystopia is also a fascinating condemnation of the cruelty we currently inflict on one another, person to person. Reading a description of a slaughter where a pig is swapped out for a human body will obviously make your stomach churn. Of course, on the surface, Tender Is the Flesh reads like a pretty cut-and-clear indictment of our factory farming practices. Scientists were working on purebred “special meat,” ever-rare and to be sold at even higher mark-ups. “Special meat” was packaged and sold for high prices. Butchers and slaughterhouses continued their jobs as normal. They were persecuted and eventually slaughtered.” And after that? The government-sanctioned solution, of course, was to create a market of breeding and slaughtering humans for consumption. (Livestock and beloved pets alike must be eliminated.) What then? Our main character discloses: “In some countries, immigrants began to disappear in large numbers. In Augstina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, we find a world that has been ravaged by a virus that renders all animals dangerous and inedible. But behind the taboo, behind the gore, what are we really talking about when we’re talking about cannibalism?

This year has been so horrific, so full of twisted headlines, that maybe the only way to illicit any genuine shock out of a reader is to take them to such an extreme. From Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulfto Shalom Auslander’s Mother for Dinner, this has been the year of books that feature people eating people.

By my count, 2020 has seen the publication of quite a few books featuring cannibalism.

Tenderis the flesh