ENOUGH WITH THE CANNIBALISM NOVELS!

Some of this shit is even AI!

You: It’s what’s for dinner! And I’m not hungry.

What’s eating contemporary literature? Why, it’s the spectre of the Donner Party! It seems like you can’t turn a corner these days without running into a book about people eating people, almost all of them by women for some reason. There’s Tender is the Flesh, Butter, The Eyes Are the Best Part, Nothing Tastes As Good, The Lamb, Girl Dinner, Hunger, which is not to be confused What Hunger, The Starving Saints, The Dead Husband Cookbook, Indigent, The Summer I Ate The Rich, Natural Beauty, The Butcher’s Daughter, The Centre, This House Will Feed, Bloom, Trad Wife¹—and these are only the ones I’ve come across, God knows how many more are out there in the wild languishing at the bottom of the publishing glut or coming out via small presses or self-publishing. I haven’t read a single one of these, and—apologies to their authors—I’m not going to. The press from most of these books comes off basically the same. WOAH!!!! EATING PEOPLE?????? Picture me yawning as the poor publishing intern tries to read the copy to me in a spooky voice, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. I’m not going to say it doesn’t succeed in making me grossed out—sure, it does—but it is not “shocking.” I get grossed out when people eat “savoury oats.”

Most of these novels seem to dwell in some way on femininity and its relationship to the body and to certain social norms (part of what has been branded as “femgore”). Bodies so objectified they become literal food (I liked it better when Atwood did it in The Edible Woman), or the inversion of those who are objectified eating other people’s bodies, or breaking the taboo that, um… women aren’t supposed to eat people or something. It’s just not proper! You’re a lady! Spit that mouthful of human liver out this instant! In some cases it’s melded with a class element (and I liked that better when Jonathan Swift did it—with more of a sense of humour—three hundred years ago) or a religious element (the Eucharist is like CANNIBALISM!!! WOAH!!!!!! I strongly suspect Caitlin Starling of The Starving Saints is a Protestant by birth²). Boring, boring, boring. I might be more inclined to be interested in any of it if it weren’t so heavy-handed about its themes from the moment you read the blurb. I think of Jessa Crispin’s rant about contemporary horror:

Critics and academics ruined horror. Absolute losers (I count myself among this group) looked at the work of perverts and wanted to justify their interest. It’s not the tits, or the blood, or the catharsis of violence. It’s commentary about the schizophrenic effects of modernity.

Bad enough to have to put up with all this sophomoric BS, but so much worse when you then also have to contend with the same metaphors over and over and over again. I encountered a book in the bookstore called My Year of Meats and I just immediately thought “yup, that’s a cannibalism book” and I don’t think it even actually is after having looked into it, but the fact that I looked at it and immediately had this assumption reflexively come to mind is what led me to write all this—what the thought itself, right or wrong, suggested, and how it felt to think it. All of this cannibalism work is so obviously positioning itself to “shock,” but if you’re looking at a bunch of products on the shelf and one of them immediately makes you think “oh is this one of those cannibalism ones?” then by definition I cannot call that “shocking”; in fact it feels more like “shopping.” I can tell that these chips are probably going to have too much flavour powder because the packaging is so “in-your-face” and the font has all these pointed edges, and I can tell this book is probably about cannibalism because the title has a starkly-worded reference to hunger or food in it. Very transgressive, yes, just like Monster Energy Drink™. It’s branding.

Cannibalism is as obvious a metaphor as it is efficient—we are “consumed” by many things, and we “consume” many things. Our human bodies, our meat suits, when objectified, become easily likened to products, and the products made up of organic matter which you use most wholly are obviously the ones you literally consume and digest—to use someone can be easily turned into a metaphor by using someone entirely, eating them. Add an ironic twist, and the subject of the metaphorical consumption can be the one doing the consuming—objectified women eating men who objectify them, poor people eating rich people, non-white people eating white people, etc. etc. etc. Then consider wellness culture, the way we are made to manage our own bodies, the emphasis on our literal diet—women especially are made to feel as though they eat too much or eat wrong or eat what they’re forbidden to. Then there’s consumption in the macro sense, in the sense of the things we as a society consume in abundance and the anxiety about that consumption, or perhaps concern for the eating of animals, and so on. And so “cannibalism” as a metaphor can easily rope in myriad critiques and comments from all angles on capitalism, gender dynamics, sexuality, ecology, race. It’s extremely easy stuff, and it is instantly legible to middlebrow readers for what it is; can often be explained in whole in one sentence; and, in spite of the repetitiveness/obviousness of these deployments, still reads as “incisive” because the central metaphor concerns one of the greatest cultural taboos.

Here’s a cannibalism metaphor for you: these fucking books. They’re shamelessly eating one another. How shameless? Well, a recent femgore book got pulled because it turned out it was written with an LLM.³ But of course it was. What else can we expect in a landscape of literary production where the attitude seems to only ever be more! more! more! We are in a cultural accumulation crisis. One factor of this crisis is the ever-expanding surplus of completely mediocre MFA students,⁴ the indigestible gristle of the writing world, who are being boiled alive for whatever the system can get out of them. They are nothing if not wanting for creativity. One of the many ramifications of this is the near-instantaneous oversaturation of just about any emergent trend. The flooding of the market with more and more shit increases the value of anything that can be instantly recognized and sold as “a thing,” something legible enough to be fed into the recommendation ecosystem of social media, book clubs, if you liked X you’ll like Y chains that platforms like GoodReads pride themselves on as they help turn literature into mere “stuff,” mere lifestyle brand bullshit. The system rewards “templates,” and “cannibalism” is now just another one of those templates.

If you liked that, you might like…

1. My ex had been reading The Vegetarian which, if memory serves, at least had some delusions of cannibalism in it.

2. I once went to a poetry reading in an abandoned church. A rather interesting setting, but I found the blatant disrespect of the attendees and performers to the faith of the people who once went there pretty unseemly. Firstly, this was a place that was once very important to a community, and I sort of feel like desecrating religious sites—regardless of the religion—is in pretty bad taste, and that was exactly what was going on. Secondly, the performers, mostly of Protestant backgrounds (one was at least Jewish), were lashing out at religion using Catholicism as their punching bag—I find that people from Protestant backgrounds do this a lot without really considering how much of this is just received runoff from anti-immigrant anti-Catholic prejudices of their societies, obviously something much more benign now than it was when those communities were actually at-risk, but it at least casts doubt onto the honesty of these performances of anti-religion. Thirdly, and reinforcing my second point, in spite of all the Catholic whipping, the church we were in was fucking Anglican.

I’m a pretty disrespectful asshole, but while I don’t consider myself above making light of people’s religious beliefs, I would really draw the line at going to those people’s place of worship and pissing on the floor (which occurred both figuratively and literally in this setting). Regardless, considering the course of our culture and the demographics that were involved, I’m sure at least half of the performers and audience now trendily identify as “Catholic” anyhow.

3. Allegedly. I mean, I’ve looked at the excerpts, and it sounds like an LLM to me (I’ve said on Notes before that I suggest reading enough ChatGPT-generated content that you start to pick up the hallmarks of its tone and can know what you’re looking for, same with AI-generated images. This will become a crucial internet literacy skill, if it isn’t already). For fairness’s sake, The Drey Dossier’s bit on this is worth looking at and provides a more measured response to this drama. Still, at the end of the day I still clock the book as AI slop. Here’s an excerpt that I read in a piece on all this by kenneth whyte (also worth a look) and you can judge for yourself:

I wear a pink dress, the kind that promises softness and delivers none. Its tulle is brittle and sharp, brushing against my fur like a thousand tiny teeth, a cruel lover that bites with every move. Every scratch keeps me in place, a reminder of what I am: a pet, a thing shaped for looking, for praise, for command. The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful. White socks climb my legs, their frills delicate, a whisper of innocence over the bruises beneath, the ones he says shouldn’t happen if the socks are there—but they always do.

The ache is low and rhythmic, a second heartbeat in my ribs, steady and insistent, the kind of pain you get used to until it becomes part of you. Then the door bursts open, and he enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle. In his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen, too perfect to hold.

4. The expansion of the MFA programs in the last fifteen years, both in terms of the number of programs and number of accepted applicants, is staggering.