Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

"When a virus makes all animal meat deadly to humans the world quickly changes and Cannibalism is legalized. This story follows Marcos, a man who works at a processing plan, where humans, who are now bred as livestock, are slaughtered. It was a quick but rough and deeply unsettling read."

⭐⭐⭐

Pros: Though the ending was insane it was definitely a shocker.

Cons: The subject matter was rough and some of the scenes were gruesomely visceral.

Full Review:

When a virus makes it so all animal meat is deadly to humans, the world quickly changes and soon Cannibalism is legalized. People need meat, the scientists claim and most people take to eating their fellow humans more easily than one would think.

Marco works at a processing plan, where humans, who are now bred as livestock are slaughtered. He also gets special requests from a game reserve, where people can pay to hunt and slaughter humans and a labortaory that runs experiments on humans to better improve the world.

It's a horrific, frightening time and Marcos is doing his best to simply keep his head above water. After the death of their son, his wife left him. His father is slowly falling into the clutches of dementia and Marcos has had to put him in a nursing home. And his sister is more concerned about societal appearances than her family. So Marcos finds himself alone and rather miserable.

When his boss sends him a "gift" in the form of a FGP (First Generation Pure) human female, he's at a loss. She was bred on a farm, fed a special diet and his boss ensures him that her meat is of the finest quality. He's not sure what to do since in reality, he hates what he does. He hates that he oversees the killing of humans day in and day out and now, here's one lone woman, at his mercy. He eventually decides to take care of the female, clean her and feed her and he realizes that, he's not so alone anymore.

This was not a fun, easy read. It was quick, yes, but it was dark and upsetting. Though I enjoyed it for the ways in which Bazterrica explained how quickly people changed and turned on one another, it was deeply disturbing simply for the fact that, sadly, with the world we live in right now, this dystopian future doesn't seem all that impossible. It's horrifying. The ending completely threw me and I closed the book, truly stunned. This was one of those books that will stay with me for a very long time as more of a cautionary tale then for its entertainment value.

Comments

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