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A review by idilreads
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
5.0
Marcos, the broken soul at the heart of this story, drags himself through each day at the local processing plant—a slaughterhouse where the screams are human. As his past and present collide, we witness the unraveling of Earth, a world where a merciless virus spared animals only to curse their flesh, leaving humanity to feed on itself.
The details are relentless. The breeding. The selection. The slaughter. Every inch of the "special meat" process is laid bare—bodies dismantled, packaged, sold. What chilled me to the bone wasn’t just the horror, but how easily people accepted it. A new world order where humans are cattle, where the privileged feast on First Generation Pure while the desperate claw for scraps outside the factory gates. A world where you don’t mourn the dead—you guard their corpses, lest they’re butchered before burial. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Marcos moves through this nightmare like a ghost—cold, detached, surviving. Until her. A "gift"—a First Generation Pure female, his to use. But in her hollow eyes, he finds something worse than cruelty: connection. And in this hell, that might be the most dangerous thing of all.
The book’s most haunting line? “The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.” And God, does it sting. Because you realize—this isn’t just fiction. It’s a funhouse mirror reflecting our own monstrosity. People cower under umbrellas, terrified of bird droppings. They mourn with platters of "special meat." They flip through cookbooks like it’s normal to carve a person alive, just enough to keep them breathing for tomorrow’s meal.
This book wounds. It’s visceral, grotesque, and impossible to shake. But beneath the blood and bile, it’s a scalpel-sharp indictment of dehumanization, of how easily we become the monsters we fear. The ending? It gutted me. And yet—I understood.
If you can stomach it, this dystopia will haunt you long after the last page. 100% recommended.
The details are relentless. The breeding. The selection. The slaughter. Every inch of the "special meat" process is laid bare—bodies dismantled, packaged, sold. What chilled me to the bone wasn’t just the horror, but how easily people accepted it. A new world order where humans are cattle, where the privileged feast on First Generation Pure while the desperate claw for scraps outside the factory gates. A world where you don’t mourn the dead—you guard their corpses, lest they’re butchered before burial. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Marcos moves through this nightmare like a ghost—cold, detached, surviving. Until her. A "gift"—a First Generation Pure female, his to use. But in her hollow eyes, he finds something worse than cruelty: connection. And in this hell, that might be the most dangerous thing of all.
The book’s most haunting line? “The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.” And God, does it sting. Because you realize—this isn’t just fiction. It’s a funhouse mirror reflecting our own monstrosity. People cower under umbrellas, terrified of bird droppings. They mourn with platters of "special meat." They flip through cookbooks like it’s normal to carve a person alive, just enough to keep them breathing for tomorrow’s meal.
This book wounds. It’s visceral, grotesque, and impossible to shake. But beneath the blood and bile, it’s a scalpel-sharp indictment of dehumanization, of how easily we become the monsters we fear. The ending? It gutted me. And yet—I understood.
If you can stomach it, this dystopia will haunt you long after the last page. 100% recommended.