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Tender Is the Flesh

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Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

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Published Aug 4, 2020

224 pages

Average rating: 7.14

954 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

nmimms
Jul 22, 2025
10/10 stars
The best book that I will never read again. I genuinely enjoyed the narrative but it took some WORK to get past the setting. If you can roll with the spirit of the novel then you get to see a fantastic break down of grief from a male perspective. It resonated with me in that way. But it also put me off meat for about a week.
Annie.S
Jul 01, 2025
7/10 stars
This book was so different than anything I have ever read. I enjoyed the comparisons that could be made to so many things about our indifference as human beings. At times it was hard to stomach but I understood that was intentional.
Vi Del Toro
Sep 26, 2025
9/10 stars
Jesus Christ my dude
Karyna99
Sep 04, 2025
10/10 stars
Great plot twist.
Fallcarry
Jul 19, 2025
1/10 star
The worst book I've ever read. Wanted to DNF so bad, but had purchased it due to all the hype. Drags on and on, boring as all get out. Are there disturbing descriptions? -sure, but if you read the description of the book, you'd already expect that type of content. So as the reader, I just waited and waited for something to actually happen (I guess?) to move the story forward, but it's just "boring man describes mundane activity" or "boring man describes weird sex act," and then it ended exactly how I imagined it would.

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