Tender is the Flesh

Who knew a book about cannibalism could be so boring, even though it focuses almost exclusively on the process of farming human beings? This is seriously amateurish. Instead of taking the time to dive deeper into the psychological, societal, or governmental implications of normalized cannibalism, Bazterrica insists on taking you through tour after tour of the various industries surrounding human farming. This becomes a tedious process when it should be horrific and stomach churning. Don't get me wrong, there are moments of that, when the humans being farmed are humanized well, but most of the time these tours devolve into descriptions of meat processing, and since the humanity is so far in the background it's easy to be detached. Perhaps the point of this cold view of the world, which extends into a bland and overly simplistic prose style, was supposed to convey our main characters disassociation from the world around him, a disassociation that is necessary in order to live in this world while trying to retain some ethics and morals. In the end though, it separated me from the human element in the story, and left me not only bored, be detached myself. Tender Is the Flesh also lacks a real concert plot-line, which could've dragged you through the ham-fisted world building and the lackluster prose. But no, Bazterrica didn't want to waste time with plot. Not that you have to have plot to make a novel good, but in this case, where there's not a lot of style or mood, a plot would've really helped.

The twist ending could've been good, but instead was so rushed that there was no reasonable explanation for it, and reads as if the author knew the book was too predictable, so they did a 180 degree turn just because they could. Feels like horrible planning on the authors part to not set that ending up in anyway. Tender Is the Flesh ends up feeling like a monument fumbling of the metaphorical bag. Canaablism, and a thematic call to action against the industrial meat industry, have been much better explored in a number of other texts, in fiction and non-fiction. This was, in my opinion, a waste of time and unfortunately over hyped.