Speculative Fiction Junkie

Joseph D'Lacey

Joseph D'Lacey's The Kill Crew (review here) was one of the best books I've read this year and it left me eager to read the rest of Mr. D'Lacey's work. The obvious place to start was with his debut novel, Meat. While the cover of the book looks suitably frightening, I can assure you that it is nothing compared to what is written on the book's pages. Meat is without question the most disturbing book I have ever read. Period.

Meat is the story of Abyrne, a dilapidated city in the middle of a boundless wasteland. At the heart of the city is meat, its manufacture and consumption, and a sort of worship of the animals from which it is derived, the so-called Chosen. Meat permeates and shapes nearly every aspect of this society: the best jobs are with the meat processing monopoly, Magnus Meat Processing; one's status is measured by how much meat one consumes; eating meat is a dictate of the religion of Abyrne, which revolves around the relationship between the town's inhabitants, the Chosen, and meat.

Richard Shanti, the protagonist, is legendary for the speed with which he performs his grim duties at the meat processing plant, but he is increasingly assaulted by feelings of guilt about the entire machine of which he is such an effective part. Since he has a family to support, however, he cannot risk drawing the attention of either the authoritarian religious authorities or of the secular power in the town, who is none other than the head of Magnus Meat Processing, Rory Magnus.

Let's get this out of the way up front: Meat may very well ruin the experience of eating meat for you. More surprisingly, it may also ruin the experience of drinking milk for you. In addition, the violence and creepiness of some of the characters in this story is truly offensive and horrific.

The horrors that Mr. D'Lacey employs, however, are only half of the story. The other half is his portrayal of the innocence of the Chosen, which is conveyed very effectively in this paragraph, for example:

Shanti didn't understand all of it and he was glad. There was so much innocence to their communication, so much acceptance of their end that it broke his heart to listen. The older calves, usually the respected teachers among them, would become frightened as they neared their time and then the hisses and taps would become a kind of harmonised prayer to give them strength and courage. The dusky halls of the veal yard throbbed with their muted rhythms and Shanti was nauseated.

The juxtaposition of the many horrors of Abyrne and the innocence and plight of the Chosen elicits the real horror that is at the heart of this book: our collective guilt and culpability for the way we treat such innocence. Mr. D'Lacey elicits this response without sounding overly judgmental or admonishing the reader. He simply presents the two images side by side and the contrast speaks for itself. In doing so, Mr. D'Lacey has added a rarely seen dimension to the horror story, one that relies on what each of us carries around inside ourselves as human beings for its effect.

I have only two minor criticisms of Meat. The first is that the horrors described in the early part of the book are so disturbing that I was left sort of numb for the remainder of it, a phenomenon akin to trying to hear the person walking next to you after passing in front of the speakers at a loud concert. Secondly, while I loved the inclusion of the secular vs. religious dynamic, a part of me wished that this part of the story had been developed a bit more. Instead, both powers are portrayed in the book as more or less monolithic entities ruled by men who are essentially mirror images of one another in their power hunger and moral depravity.

In the final analysis, Meat is a major achievement even if it is not, in my opinion, quite as strong a work as The Kill Crew is. Several other reviewers have referred to Mr. D'Lacey as a writer of "eco horror." While I don't think this is incorrect per se, I think it fails to do justice to the scope of what he's doing, which is nothing less than writing stories whose true sense of horror relies on the reader's core humanity for its effect.

Rating: 8/10

The True First

Meat was first published in the UK as a trade paperback by Bloody Books in 2008. It is not available in bookstores in the United States.

[This review was based on a review copy]