Tejo is unlike everyone else in his world, however: he has never managed to make the conscious separation between humans bred for slaughter and ‘people’ such as himself. This widening of scope occurs early in the novel, when Tejo is provided a gift from work: a prized female of his own to eat. If this were the only message the book carried, it wouldn’t be adding anything new to the popular discourse.įortunately, Tender is the Fleshoffers a broader scope than that. Therein lies the book’s first clear-cut message: to consider how modern-day battery farming, and meat and dairy production, treats non-human animals: the conditions they’re kept in the ways they are raised, tortured, abused, and ultimately killed. The humans that are bred for slaughter are not considered people, are referred to as ‘heads’, and are kept in much the same condition as cattle are today. Known as the Transition, wherein human meat production became an accepted norm Tainted, and mostly wiped out, most non-human animals, and so came a period Slaughterhouse which deals exclusively in human meat.

Or a possible parallel to, our own, our protagonist Tejo works at a Living in a world that is either a little to the future of, Though it’s worth emphasising right now that it is a bleak, gruesome, stomach-churning one from beginning to end. Tender is the Fleshis a novel of this exact kind: a critique of our present and a warning against a possible future. Books are written and read for an infinite number of reasons, and with the case of dystopian literature it is often written as a warning of things to come, or things that are already stirring – a chance for readers to become woke to the social and political shifts of the present and the future. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a work of literature does not have to be enjoyable to be considered good.

Tenders the flesh