After finishing this book i had one of the worst nightmares of my life. I have read horror books that filled me with dread but this was the perfect level of eery and torment, i genuinely had to stop reading it at night because i would end up feeling watched and spend the night not sleeping!

Review: ||I have seen many people lump this book along with other works of extreme horror and I personally do not agree with that classification. It is absolutely a work that depicts horror, and there have been many points throughout the novel that have forced me to put the book down and take a lap otherwise I would feel sick, but it never felt gratuitous. It definitely will give you a shock, but the way these moments are depicted lacks the crude edginess that I find more common in splatter punk, and are instead introduced through mechanical, cold and detached lenses. There is judgment, there is a bloody description. But it's not visceral (pun not intended).

Marcos Tejo, our protagonist, lives through this world with what I would call a double life. On the outside he depicts himself as this cold, detached, and perfectly adjusted man. Someone who has gone through hardships sure, but he intentionally isolates himself from the rest of the world. After all, what's the point of creating human connection when the whole concept of what it means to be human and what allows you to be seen as one instead of just meat, is getting more and more blurry by the day? On the inside, Marcos is a cynical, judgmental individual, who seems to hold himself to quite the higher moral ground. He takes care of his demented father, he gives his grieving wife space, he is a diligent worker despite hating his job, he is against The Transition and has turned to veganism.

And at first glance like many, you look at this and say "Ah he is a good man. He is a kind person. He is just trapped in these circumstances." Is he? The answer, if you pay attention, has been given to us since the beginning. In the first chapter, as Marcos tells us about the messed up world we are now plunged into, he talks to us about how his father reacted to this horrifying change, along with many others : He went mad. And really isn't that truly what someone who has strong integrity and morals would do in a situation like this? Go insane? Cry out at the atrocity? Refuse to accept it as a new normality? We are introduced to another character that went mad, one of Marcos workers who we are told is a learned man despite the blue collar job he does. He is also on the front line of this horror. And he can't accept it, ending up with taking his life. ||Marcos too is against the change and is horrified by how quickly it all happened. And in weak protest he refuses to eat meat. But he still shows up at work, at the slaughter house, and he doesn't just show up, he is an integral part of this job. He works at one of the most prestigious slaughter houses, and he handles everything with great efficiency. He excuses this by repeating that he has to take care of the sick father, something that he wouldn't need to do if his sister which he is extremely critical of, would help. He also appreciates the job because it gives him something else to think about since he is separated with his wife and has recently lost his son. And he keeps piling up excuses to justify his silence and compliancy, while spitting venom against any other cog of this meat chopping machine.

Especially the women. He can be scared by the men. He can be disturbed by the men, he pities them, he understands them, he can be harsh but never unforgiving. Even with the worst of the worst he looks at them and accepts it that this is their nature.

The women don't receive the same leniency. He despises his sister, who has perfectly assimilated herself into this world, although more than one scene makes it obvious she is clawing at reality with all she has. The second his father starts to degenerate, he becomes venomous towards the nurse that for years has taken care of him, tossing her aside since she is no longer needed. He assaults Spamel, stating more than once that he wants to hurt and break her, envious of her ability to shut out everything and everyone, turning, twisting what she has once done with him in a humiliation ritual. Disrespecting his grieving wife calling her broken ( which i read as him referring to both her mental state and her inability to carry out successful pregnancy or give him an healthy child) and when Jasmin appears in his life, he stops trying to reach for her, stop hoping she will return and actually refers to her at his ex wife in a single moment towards the end accusing her of having taken too long and that she couldn't possibly expect him to wait for her forever. Not now that he has what he wanted. ||At the start, before the second half of the book, I believed, stupidly, that this would turn into an almost father daughter relationship, that he would care for her and give her back her humanity. But the second I read the phrase "She is 8 months pregnant" I knew what this was about. And it becomes increasingly more obvious as time goes. He treats her like a pet, drawing a number of parallels between how he treated his dogs and other animals and how he threatens her. The moment that consolidated this to me was when he brings her under the three, mirroring an anecdote he shared about his two dogs, he keeps repeating that she is incapable of thinking. Never really giving her the chance to be seen as human. Only when Jasmine has done what he needed her to do (give him a son) does drop the mask (And welcomes back his wife, because he needs her to be a mother to his child and a nurse) and disposes of Jasmine, knowing she has become too self aware. Because in a world where everything is permitted if you just use the right words for it, why can't he take what he wants? He was "against the system" but really he just needed to find a way to exploit it in his favor.

The language in this book is a crucial theme, it is reiterated multiple times, to the point that the language becomes a character. We aren't described how a new character looks but we are told every time about how they speak, what their words sound, feel and taste like. They are people because they can talk. Jasmine can't, so… The language around the new industry of the meat changed to obfuscate the violence, censoring reality, allowing for an easy trick to look something in the face and still not give it a name. It is reminiscent to me of the way people have been self censoring in today's social media, saying "Unalive" instead of Killing or "Suer Side" instead of Suicide, "Grape or SA" instead of Rape, "PDF File" instead of Pedophile. Words that are considered icky or jarring...when that's exactly what they are meant for. Words used to hide the horror, as the book says. Making us insensitive to the violence, making it "Easier to digest" (second pun not intended). And in the end Tejo still uses that clean censored language because he knows that the consequences are… we don't know exactly. It's treated more as a social cue than a crime. Like farting in public. . We are all Marcos Tejo when we choose to be silent and compliant. When you look away from the news, when you redirect that political conversation, when you act un surprised at the new conflict that has blown up, look at your plate :what are you eating?

The book also makes it obvious as to how they went so far without complications. The first to die and be eaten were the undesirable. The immigrants, the homeless, the ones living at the edges of society who no one would look for. And that opens the Pandora box of "what is the limit?" The criminals don't go to prison animore, the go to the slaughter house. People immolate themselves through an holy ritual that no one believes in. If you walk out at the wrong our you can disappear, no point in looking for you. You are now meat. Meat is meat. This world is a boiling pot and everyone is a frog sitting in it not realizing that their time is running out. We see it with the attack of the camion by the necrofages, and everyone's immediate fear is that they will learn to donit again and it will become a spread issue. But it reflects in Marcos who so easily tosses away all his moralism the second he sees a chance for personal gain. The new generations are growing insensitive and alienated, playing a game where they guess what they would taste like. How long before a brother eats another, and a new, more horrifying myth of Able and Cain is created?

||Final considerations and conclusion:

An element of this book that was inescapable for me was the reminder that this has happened. There has been more than once a time in history where people stopped being people, where the language around them changed and their personhood was stripped. It happened with the enslavement of black people in America, and the encampment of Jewish people under nazi Germany. We read this book and see it as unthinkable, we look at the past and look at it as a barbaric uneducated and ignorant version of the world, we are better now, we know better. And this book is just a book. A horrible take that once you close the page will disappear.

The death penalty is still in use in 55 countries. Women are being stripped of their rights, reproductive and social ones. There are 3 genocides currently happening. The ice is melting.

What’s on your plate?