The genius of Tender is the Flesh is that it doesn’t force anything on you. All until Marcos is gifted a woman, part of a special lot, as a “thank you” from one of his more loathsome suppliers, and suddenly his business takes a more personal–and dangerous–turn as he has to decide the fate of the living being in his hands. He remains detached, above the business he’s complicit in, dealing only with the business end and never with the humans that are bought, sold, and butchered. Marcos is the man in charge of “meat runs” for Krieg Processing, tasked with buying herds of humans for slaughter and production so he can make ends meet and provide for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. The government instead implements “the Transition” to using captive humans as “special meat” to fill the animal-shaped void. Animals are instantly eradicated, and humans must either go vegan or die.

Even a scratch from an infected animal, or use of an animal product, could cause painful death in humans. In the future, a disease called GGB infects animals. From there, Bazterrica makes you question exactly where you would draw the line: how comfortable could you be in this awful, depraved society? And are the people who seem sympathetic for being “less bad” really all that much different from those they condemn? In the process, the book raises questions about belief, necessity, and exactly what people are capable of when they believe they have no other options–or worse, when they’re certain they’re in the right.īut first, it’s good to have a plot synopsis so we know what we’re talking about. That world is disturbing, to be sure, but the truly brain-warping thing about this book is the way the author naturalizes its awful world, using neutral language to slowly get the reader accustomed to the depraved concepts therein. It’s a deeply disturbing story, but not solely due to the world it describes.

Over the span of the book, Bazterrica recounts numerous depraved acts and twisted torments inflicted upon humans. The 2020 dystopian novel by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica (translated into English by Sarah Moses) plunges us into a world where, due to a mysterious disease that affects all animals, humans decide to use other humans in place of animals for food and byproducts. Editor’s note: spoilers follow for Tender is the Flesh.

Tender is the flesh agustina