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"There are words that are convenient. Hygienic. Legal."

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TL;DR: Tender Is the Flesh looks like shock-horror cannibalism, but it’s really a terrifying argument about how law and language decide who counts as human. In a world where people are legally reclassified as “product,” violence becomes bureaucratic, normal, and morally invisible. The horror it how easily society adapts once the vocabulary changes. I originally dismissed it as edgy dystopia, reread it through a law-and-literature lens, and realized it’s one of the smartest novels about dehumanisation and legal fiction I’ve read. ♡

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Trigger Warnings at the end if anyone is curious enough and/or needs them!

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Contents

‎ 1) First impressions ‎ 2) The argument ‎ 3) Three moments that carry it ‎ 4) Why this isn't only fiction ‎ 5) The Verdict ‎ 6) Is this book for you? ‎ 7) Trigger Warnings

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1) First Impressions

I first read this around 2018, 2019, before the pandemic, before BookTok got to it, before it started being mentioned alongside 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. A bookseller I'd been talking to for years had it flagged as underrated. It was thin. I gave it a chance.

I gave it three stars. It was fine. I filed it away.

Part of the problem was how I came to it. In Mexico (and now I know in Italy as well), you'd find this book in the horror section with a romance tag, which primed me to read it as a dark, atmospheric love story with dystopian texture. That is not what it is. Reading Tender Is the Flesh as a romance is like thinking Lolita is a romance: technically “possible”, entirely mistaken, and a little revealing about yourself (pls someone check their hard drive and cloud account).

When TikTok discovered it, I was sceptical in the way you become sceptical when a book you found mediocre becomes a phenomenon. I assumed the algorithm had done its usual thing: amplified something accessible and aesthetically grim until it looked profound. I will admit I stayed on my high horse for a while.

Then I ended up in Italy, studying abroad, enrolled in a Law and Literature course I'd signed up for on a whim. I expected legal dramas and close reading. What I got was something closer to a rearrangement of how I think: doors opening in my brain that I hadn't known existed. When it came time to write a final essay-presentation on anything at the intersection of law, literature, and philosophy, I scrolled through everything I'd ever read, everything I’ve ever consumed. I thought about presenting a videogame: TLOU or Detroit: Become Human. I thought about Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0. I even briefly considered Legally Blonde, which — if you know me and my uni days — is perhaps not as absurd as it sounds.

And then, almost by accident, I came back to the one I'd dismissed. Because nothing fit the question more precisely: What happens when the law says who is human, and what happens to those who aren’t? What happens to those who aren’t human enough?

So I read it again, and this time, I understood it completely differently. For that alone, I’m bumping it up to 4.3 stars, with the extra 0.2 specifically awarded for helping me earn a 30 e lode on my final presentation. wink

What follows is an adapted version of that presentation. If you feel like joining me for the ride, I’d genuinely love that. And if not, feel free to skip ahead to the “Is This Book for You?” and/or “Trigger Warnings” sections if you’re only here to decide whether the book itself is worth reading.

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2) The Argument

Let me start with a question. If I handed you a document today, official, stamped, legally binding, that declared you were no longer a person, that you were now classified as a product, would that make it true? Your instinct is probably no. Of course note. You’re still you. I’m still me. The law cannot change what we fundamentally are.

But here's what the novel wants you to sit with: legally, linguistically, it does. The law doesn’t need you to change biologically or metaphysically who you are; it only needs to change what you're called. The consequences follow from the name, not from the tangible reality.

The premise: a virus has made all animal meat lethal to humans. Every animal on earth has been systematically destroyed, livestock, pets, wildlife, all of it, gone. Faced with a protein crisis, the governments of this world don't turn to plant-based alternatives (sad). They legalise the farming, slaughter, and consumption of human beings. But they don't call it that. They never call it “legalised cannibalism”. The humans being farmed are called heads, or product. The slaughterhouses are processing plants. The legalisation period is called la Transición, the Transition. The vocabulary of personhood has been surgically replaced by the vocabulary of livestock management, and it is arrestable to use the old words (you can and will be “processed” for saying that).

Our protagonist, Marcos Tejo, runs one of these plants. He is not a monster. He is, in fact, the most morally awake character in the novel, the only one who consistently sees the cognitive operation being performed on everyone around him and names it, privately, to himself. He knows the word for what he does every day. He just cannot say it out loud. That tension, between what he knows and what he is permitted to name, is where the entire argument lives.

James Boyd White, one of the founders of the law and literature movement, argues that legal language is not a neutral tool we use to describe a pre-existing reality. It is the medium in which social reality is constructed. It doesn't label things that are already there, it makes things real in the social world. Richard Posner adds that law habitually takes what he calls "a dichotomous cut at a continuous problem", it draws a hard line where no natural line exists. Guilty or not guilty. Disabled or not disabled. Person or not person. The line is a legal fiction. But once it is drawn, it produces real effects, because the law treats it as real.

Bazterrica takes Posner's observation to its extreme. The dichotomous cut is: human or product. And the novel asks what the world looks like on the other side of that cut, once it has been enforced, normalised, bureaucratised. The answer is not monstrous. It is ordinary. It looks like hygiene regulations and trade fairs and investors asking perfectly reasonable business questions. Because that is what legal normalisation produces: not monsters, but administrators.

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3) Three Moments That Carry It

(Mild spoilers! These are from the first half of the book.)

The first is the novel's opening pages. Marcos wakes in the night, unable to sleep, thinking about his work. In the original Spanish: "Nadie los llama así. Él no los llama así cuando tiene que explicarle a un empleado nuevo cómo es el ciclo de la carne. Podrían arrestarlo por hacerlo." Nobody calls them that. He doesn't call them that when explaining the production cycle to a new employee. He could be arrested for doing so. And then, a few lines later, the novel's thesis in miniature: "Hay palabras que son convenientes, higiénicas. Legales."

That word, higiénicas, is doing everything. The legal vocabulary is hygienic in the precise sense: it removes contamination. The contamination is recognition. As long as the word human is in the sentence, what is happening is legible as horror. Replace it with product, and the horror becomes administration. Marcos also reflects on the word Transición, the official term for the legalisation period, and calls it a word that "summarizes and catalogs an immeasurable fact." It doesn't say anything false. It simply selects what to show and what to hide.

The second is a tour of a breeding farm, a criadero, conducted for a German investor named Egmont. The farm owner narrates the operation exactly as you would narrate a livestock facility: men are padrillos (studs), women are hembras (females), humans are cabezas (heads), and the best of the best are the PGP/Primera Generación Pura (the First Pure Generation, humans born and raised entirely in captivity). He explains genetics, insemination, diet. And the language works. It works on Egmont, who listens and asks perfectly reasonable business questions. At one point he looks at a person in a cage and says, as a joke, "what a good life that one has." He is not a sadist. The language has already done its work: the man in the cage registers as a specimen, an investment, a producer of future product. The suffering doesn't fail to move him because he is cruel. It fails to move him because the category that would make it legible as suffering, this is a human being in pain, has been legally removed from the available vocabulary. This is precisely what Stanley Fish means by interpretive communities: meaning is not in the text, it is produced by the community reading it. The community of this novel has been trained, legally and socially, to read human beings as product. And once that training is in place, what they see is product.

The third moment is the most intimate. At a certain point, Marcos is given a young woman, a PGP, as a business gift from the farm owner. She arrives at his house on a rope. She has no name. She has a brand mark, a product number, a genetic classification.

Marcos names her Jasmine.

That act, a single word, privately chosen, legally impermissible, is the first fracture in the system. Names belong to persons. By naming her, Marcos performs a counter-legal act: he restores a word, and with the word, a category, and with the category, a moral reality the law has officially declared not to exist. The novel ends, I won't say how, because the ending is the kind of thing you should encounter for yourself, by demonstrating that the legal fiction doesn't hold. That what was erased keeps returning. Not through the law. Despite it. In private acts of naming.

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4) Why This Isn't Only Fiction

The history of law is partly a history of who counts as a person. Roman law distinguished between persona (legal subject) and res (thing). Slaves were res. They could be owned, transferred, destroyed. The violence inflicted on them was not a violation of the law. It was consistent with it, because the person to whom the violence was done did not legally exist as a person.

Hannah Arendt, writing about statelessness after the Second World War, described the loss of legal status as the loss of the right to have rights. Once you are outside the legal category of person, there is no mechanism by which harm done to you can be addressed. There is no legal subject to address it to. The harm is real. The suffering is real. But legally, it is invisible, because visibility, in the law, requires a subject, and the subject has been administratively removed.

This is not a closed chapter. Look at what is happening to the Palestinian people: not only a biological erasure (let's call it what it is and what it is is a genocide), but also a legal and linguistic one, a sustained effort to reclassify their suffering as something other than harm done to persons, to remove them from the category of subject to whom protection is owed. When the vocabulary of personhood is contested, eroded, or simply not applied, the crimes committed become, in Bazterrica's precise word, higiénicas. Clean. Administrable. Legal. The suffering is still there. It simply loses its address. And without an address, the law has nowhere to send a remedy.

Bazterrica is working squarely in that tradition. She is asking: what if we did this systematically, transparently, with the full force of a functioning state apparatus? Not as a crime. As a law. Her answer is the world of the novel, which is to say, a world that is not entirely fictional.

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5) The Verdict

We tend to think of law as something that responds to harm: that identifies it, names it, remedies it. Bazterrica's sharpest claim is the reversal of that assumption: what happens when the law is not the remedy, but the prior act that makes harm invisible in the first place? What happens when the law is the thing that prevents the naming?

The answer is Marcos's sleepless nights, a man who knows the word for what he is seeing, who can think it privately but cannot say it out loud, who is the only person in his world carrying the cognitive weight of a reality the law has officially declared not to exist.

The answer is also Jasmine. Because Boyd White says that legal language is not separate from social life, it is part of it. What Bazterrica adds is the darker corollary: if legal language can construct community, it can also destroy it. And the rebuilding, when it comes, has to start with a word.

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6) Is This Book For You?

Read this if you:

♡ Can engage with horror as philosophical argument ♡ Are interested in how language constructs — and destroys — moral reality ♡ Want a short book that stays with you for years ♡ Appreciate restraint and precision over spectacle ♡ Don't need to like a book the first time to find it important the second

Skip this if you:

♡ Are looking for emotional warmth ♡ Need catharsis at the end ♡ Read horror for atmosphere/jumpscared rather than ideas ♡ Are in a sensitive place with themes of violence and bodily autonomy

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7) Trigger Warnings

This book contains graphic depictions and themes of:

♡ Animal death / mass extinction ♡ Body horror ♡ Child loss / grief ♡ Death ♡ Dehumanisation ♡ Forced captivity and breeding ♡ Graphic slaughter ♡ Infant death ♡ Mental illness / dissociation ♡ Physical and sexual violence ♡ SA / non-consensual situations ♡ Suicide ♡ Systemic violence and state-sanctioned harm

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OG review: This is so weird because I know for a fact that i read this book but it isn't here?? I think I gave it 3 or 4 stars. given how short it is, I may re-read it bc, wtf. kaakak I even remember the ending and the fact de que lo leí en español. o.O