Bad Food, No Biting

You might remember me talking about Tender is the Flesh when it first came out back in August. It’s premise is a harrowing: in a world in which all animal meat has become poisonous to ingest, humans having become the new livestock of choice. It is a chilling look at how far humanity might go, if only they are given permission. Marcos makes a living processing this “special meat”, all the while trying to focus on numbers, consignments, and processing not on how it really is that he makes his living. Until the day he’s given a “gift”. But the longer he spends with this “live specimen of the finest quality”, the less he is able to see her as just another number and begins to see and treat her like a human being. And with that comes the need to acknowledge the truth of what humanity has become.

I had to get one corn book on this list, obviously. Corn is ALWAYS evil and not to be trusted. And the corn that grows in Phalene, in particular, is not to be trusted. There is a reason that Margot’s mother left the town, and told her daughter nothing about where they’d come from no matter how often she asked. They had no family. No history. Until Margot found a photograph pointing her towards Phalene. But what she finds there is not at all what she expected. Her family’s roots, it seems, run deep and rotten beneath the town, and it soon becomes clear that her mother had good reasons for running.

Forget mutated viruses, radioactive fallout, or pestilences escaped from labs – apparently the real threat of a zombie apocalypse lies in a batch of infected donuts. The annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas, was already a tense event when the usual crowd of soccer moms and grandmothers with baked goods in hand found themselves going toe to toe with a bunch of party crashing pro wrestlers. But when the suspect donuts transform most of the wrestlers into brain hungry zombies, things really get complicated. The doors to the conventions center are locked, the survivors trapped inside, and it’s mom’s against monsters to see who will survive the day.

This anthology collects 22 stories from authors who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity, all centered around the theme of dark appetites. It explores the connection between food and violence in horror, the frequency of consumption as a theme in the genre, and the sometimes very thin line between eating and being eaten. The intersection is one that Cade is well versed in, being the author of Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings, which – if you’re interested in academic texts about the horror genre – is a fascinating read. From the dangerous culinary temptations of Hansel and Gretel to more modern tales of tasty terrors, Food and Horror lays the groundwork that the authors of the Sharp & Sugar Tooth anthology build their own narratives upon. Authors like Catherynne M. Valente, Damien Angelica Walters, Alyssa Wong, Betsy Aoki, Chikodili Emelumadu, and more.