Book Review: Tender Is the Flesh (2020)
Scribner
(This review contains spoilers.)
Tender Is the Flesh came highly recommended when I mentioned to a literary group that I wanted to explore more female horror authors. My list of favorite horror novels from the last decade was mostly men, and I knew there had to be more women out there who were doing things that I would respond to.
I’m happy to say that I’ve since found a number of female authors who kill it, Catriona Ward and Zoje Stage foremost among them, but I still wanted to return to what was the most-suggested novel when I made my original inquiry. Clearly, this translated novel with a blood red cover had provoked strong reactions among readers, and I was ready to join their ranks.
But was this novel really good, or like so many other over-aggrandized publications of the last few years, simply trading on a striking concept alone? I’d bounced hard off of the amateurish, meandering writing and stillborn scares of White Horse, felt active pain over the indulgent prose and absurd color commentary in Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and, while I came to love the author, was rather lukewarm on the lauded What Moves the Dead. There’s clearly a stripe of beloved novels from the past few years that just don’t work for me, usually because of something in their construction that benumbs my literary sensibilities.
Twenty pages into Tender, I was all-in, but before I tell you why I did or didn’t stay there, let’s look at the novel itself.
Opening Veins
Marcos Tejos serves as a high-level manager at a specialized meat processing plant. He meets with distributors, inspects livestock, and formulates the agreements that supply the plant. Once there, the products are caged, treated with growth hormones and vaccines, and cared for until slaughtered or sold. There’s even a special grade of first-generation, ultra-premium specimen, called FGP, that his company specializes in. Marcos despises the job and finds it repulsive, but feels he has to keep the position to care for his ailing, enfeebled father and rebuild his marriage which was broken by the death of a child.
That may all seem mundane, but Tender Is the Flesh goes hard and gruesome from the outset: in this novel, cows, pigs, poultry, and all other forms of animal life have all been rendered inedible by a virus which kills the humans who consume it, and hence humans simply consume each other. That’s right, Tender Is the Flesh’s premise is a world where humanity is less than three decades removed from the proliferation of mass cannibalism.
Piece of Gristle
From the outset, I struggled with the premise. I will gladly accept a world where mushrooms infect and reanimate the dead, ancient evils of the Western esoteric tradition reside inside a bell in smalltown Indiana, or most of the characters are, in fact, one character, but something about the idea of industrialized cannibalism that looks more or less exactly like our modern meat industry–and grew out from our contemporary age over a couple decades–felt hard to swallow (sorry).
It’s a fair idea on which to build a speculative fiction novel, but something in the execution missed. Humans, called ‘special meat,’ are raised in captivity, bred for their taste, and pumped full of things to increase the profitability of their sale. There are token passages and hand-waves about dissidents being put down by the government, mass propaganda campaigns to brainwash the populace, and rumors of dissent, but these all felt a bit thin and I paused more than once in my read to reflect on how absurd it all felt. I just needed a bit more on the bone (sorry-ish) to get me there, and I don’t feel the author accomplished that in this case.
Fortunately, that was the only difficult part in reading this novel. The writing style is wonderfully sterile and distant, a tone that matches a world which has collectively created a glassy-eyed acceptance around one of humanity’s greatest taboos. This is something modern authors are doing so well–coding the attitude of their books into the text’s style–and Agustina Bazterrica nails it in this novel.
Once you’ve accepted the premise, it’s a pretty smooth read, though not much happens for the first half of the book until Tejos is gifted a female FGP for his own personal consumption. Only Marcos hates cannibalism, so he ties her up in the barn and keeps her as a pet.
While the writing and atmosphere of the book are to be commended, I really struggled with the plot of the novel, which is nearly nonexistent. Every scene falls into one of three categories as our sole perspective character wanders toward the back cover:
Marcos reflects on a tarnished relationship with one of his family members. He hates his sister, who shares none of his conviction about ‘special meat.’ He is estranged from his wife, who left him when their child died, and he is sad about the state of his father, who resides in a nursing home and is largely bereft of his mental faculties.
Marcos engages with a pantomime villain of the meat industry. We have our big game hunters who hunt indebted celebrities before eating them, our Japanese skin connoisseur who Ed Gein's people for profit, our weird church who gives up people to be eaten for reasons I never understood. All of these episodic chapters are simply meant to be grotesque and don’t tie back into the main story in any substantial way. Frankly–and I don’t say this to be cruel–there’s a real lack of creativity in each instance.
Marcos reflects on the world that was, lamenting the loss of birds, of dogs, of pigs.
There are a few outliers, but that’s probably 85% of the chapters in this book.
Marcos eventually makes a lover of his pet FGP, a woman who has lived her life in captivity, has no vocal chords, and has never been treated as anything but an animal. She conceives a child and all at once has to be hidden from the authorities, as engaging in sexual relations with livestock is highly illegal. Unfortunately, hiding the pregnant woman never amounts to more than moving her into a room in his house and calling in a favor to another official to keep the livestock agent at bay.
Tender Is the Flesh is supposed to be a book of horrors, but sometimes the payoff is so deeply uncreative that I just find myself rolling my eyes. The author’s penultimate bad guy is a female Dr. Mengele-character whose experiments are simple tortures that are neither deeply grotesque or scientifically sensible. What exactly is the point of an award-winning eugenicist simulating car crashes to ‘build safer cars’ when this is something readily researched already? This recurring dearth of creativity that crops up when it's time for these setpieces really spoils the book, managing to be both absurd and lazy at the same time.
It ends with Marcos Tejos, our One Good Man, murdering the FGP he kept as a lover once she has given him the child that reunites him with his wife. All this time, he has been our beacon of morality, the person we are supposed to root for, believe in, whatever…and he murders the woman he had shown so much love to. To me, it honestly reeks of an author who had no plan of how to finish their book.
Also, there’s a wonderfully pointless scene where teenagers murder a bunch of puppies. So edge.
My biggest problem with Tender Is the Flesh is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything about the topics it engages. There’s no real message about the meat industry, the complicity of humans, the spectrum of family dynamics. It’s an aimless mishmash of modern cynicism and literary wastefulness on a level Chuck Palanhiuk never quite managed.
Verdict: 4.1/10
Strengths
Excellent, organic, thematically-rooted writing
Strong chapter construction?
Weaknesses
Thin story, ultimately saying nothing
Feels like dressed-up shock writing
Social commentary is piecemeal and aimless
All the nasty villains are caricatured, absurd
You can pick up this book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, from an independent bookstore in your community.
You may also like: Mexican Gothic, Chuck Palanhiuk’s lesser novels, Joseph Suglia
