Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really didn't like this book. Let me tell you why. It wasn't that the descriptions (or the concept of humans being bred as a meat source) were so "gruesome" -- I've read a few books about slaughterhouses and the awfulness of factory farming (see "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer and "Slaughterhouse" by Gail A. Eisnitz) and as a result, I'm pretty much a vegetarian. It wasn't even the idea of these things happening to humans that necessarily bothered me -- anyone who has studied the Holocaust, as I have, or true crime, as I have, is pretty much numb to the barbarity that ensues as a result of man's inhumanity to man. Pretty much the whole history of the 20th century can be reduced to one long list of the various depravities that certain members of the human race have enjoyed inflicting upon one another. Indeed, that seems to be the point here, for there is no other. The book exists for no other reason than to attempt to shock, disgust, and depress mainstream readers (and by mainstream, I mean readers for whom something like this is the exception to their normal genre choice, rather than the norm). Just a little over 200 pages of cheap thrills, with no redeeming characters or much of a plot at all. As for the writing, I can only assume that something must have been lost in translation, because the writing itself is flat and anemic (so to speak). It's possible that this was intentional -- to describe atrocities such as these with such a tone of indifference, one can't help but be reminded of the phrase coined by Hannah Arendt describing Adolf Eichmann's brutality as "the banality of evil", when he said he was simply doing his job (that job being, of course, the systematic extermination of Jewish people). Perhaps I'm giving out too much credit, and it's just a poor translation. Perhaps not. Either way, if you're bored of watching Friends or Gilmore Girls and would like to shake up your evening by reading a "shocking" book filled with descriptions of basic slaughterhouse practices applied to human beings instead of cows and pigs, you will perhaps like this book, and will breathlessly turn the pages with your mouth hanging open, eager to share what you're reading with your hapless friends and family members, and you will likely join the scads of positive reviewers here. If, however, you're more than familiar with the names Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, and of course Jeffrey Dahmer, the idea of cannibalism will not be shocking to you. If you're aware of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer who tortured and experimented on helpless, innocent women and children during the second World War, you will quickly tire of what you read here. And if you've seen the film Soylent Green, which was released in 1973 but which takes place in 2022, you will find no new ground being tread here at all (this book even loosely references Soylent Green, when one of the teenagers who is torturing Marcos' puppies brings it up). There will always be books like these, and gorehounds (as I very much used to be) will always gleefully snap them up to add to their collections. The truth is, I bought this book because a trace of the old me, the me who is still darkly fascinated by such horrors (as tired and unoriginal as they ever may be), still lives somewhere inside. There's a part of that fascination in all of us, of course, or else we'd never pick up books like this in the first place. I can't tell you whether or not you should read this book. But I can tell you this: Despite everything I've seen and read in my life, despite all the callousness, cruelty, blood and gore I've deliberately steeped myself in for the past 30+ years as a student of horror, of history, of crime -- despite all of it, I still threw THIS book against the wall upon reading the ending. Therefore, one might call it a success.