Dark Narratives: August Issue
Killer appetites and hot release news for the dog days of summer
The hottest days of summer are upon us, and fall is right around the corner. Who’s excited for pumpkin spice everything and the return of Spirit Halloween stores?
Well, before we get there, let’s delve in to a few community updates — plus, a deep dive into cannibalism! And don’t forget to hit that subscribe button to ensure Dark Narratives delivers safely to your inbox each month.
If you haven’t seen it yet, my next novel House of Lazarus — the sequel to River of Souls — is now available for pre-order! https://www.amazon.com/House-Lazarus-Books-Book-ebook/dp/B099QFN2WN
Speaking of pre-orders, slide on over to pick up Sometimes We’re Cruel, the debut collection from newcomer J.A.W. McCarthy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BD9FZJQ
T.J. Tranchell is on a quest to sell 42 books before turning 42 years old in October. I bet we can blow that goal out of the water, don’t you think? Go pick one up here: https://tjtranchell.net/shop
The highly anticipated re-master of Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water is coming out in October, so get ready: https://collider.com/fatal-frame-maiden-of-the-black-remaster-water-release-date-trailer/
Never Whistle At Night, an anthology of indigenous horror edited by Shane Hawk, has an open call for submissions! If you’re tribally affiliated you absolutely don’t want to miss this one (and if you’re not, you should keep an eye out for the release anyway because it’ll be awesome): https://shanehawk.com/submit/
Fears of being eaten alive or held captive and butchered for meat show up in all sorts of media, from high-gore horror stories to children's fairytales. Indeed, few tropes seem to have the staying power and endurance of cannibalism and its adjacent horrors. Being gruesomely murdered is one thing, but being murdered and eaten -- somehow that's more engaging, more grotesque, more *horrifying*. Why else would zombies be characterized by their ravenous hunger? Why else do monsters have such massive teeth and insatiable appetites? In some ways, the fear of being eaten forms a foundation for all other types of fear.
But why is that? How did we get here? Why are we so culturally obsessed with eating and being eaten -- even to the point of sexualizing it at times? And how can we best satisfy our own "appetites" for these gruesome tales?
A Brief History of Cannibalism
Before we delve too deep into the mythic significance of human consumption, it's important to acknowledge that cannibalism has a grounded, real-world history as well. Cannibalism -- the consumption of one's own species -- happens throughout the animal kingdom. It's common among spiders and certain insects, of course, adding a veneer of danger to the sexual interactions of the black widow spider or praying mantis. But it happens in social animals as well. Lions, for example, will kill and sometimes eat the offspring of neighboring prides; male bears will kill and eat cubs fathered by other males. In many species, cannibalism becomes a route toward sexual dominance, reproductive success, and the furthering of one's own genes.
But people are different. Or, anyway, we pretend that we are.
The word "cannibal" derives from the Spanish word caníbalis, itself a bastardization of Caríbales -- named for the people of the Caribbean. Rumors of cannibalism throughout indigenous populations settled in the wake of Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, and they would color public perception of these groups for centuries. Never mind that most tribes did not routinely practice cannibalism (ritualistic or otherwise), and never mind that cannibalism showed up time and again in Europe's own history -- eating people is something that "other" folks do, and an excuse to step in to "civilize" those groups to bring them to heel. Cannibalism is a sure marker of a person's inhumanity and monstrousness, so the people who engage in it must be inhuman monsters. Right?
Well, sometimes.
Some of history's most notorious serial killers have been cannibals. Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish and Andrei Chikatilo are just a few of the killers best-known for noshing on their victims. According to psychological profiles, this urge to eat people is tied most often to insecurity, sexual fantasy, and a desire for power and intimacy -- similar (and sometimes overlapping) with a proclivity for necrophilia.
But these man-eating murderers are just one small sliver of the cannibalism pie. Far more often, incidents of humans eating each other have been driven by famine and desperation. War, crop failure, harsh winters, extensive poverty, extreme isolation and long siege conditions have all contributed to cannibalism throughout history. Ritualistic cannibalism -- which satisfies a spiritual need rather than a physical hunger -- has also been practiced in some areas, though not as frequently as dehumanizing colonialists might suggest. In South America, Australia and Papua New Guinea, for example, groups have been known to eat their loved ones as part of a grieving ritual.
But when it comes to horror, we're not shivering at the thought of our ashes being mixed into a drink at our funeral. So let's get back to the bigger issue at hand: Why it's so damn terrifying to think about being eaten.
Man-Eaters and Our Precarious Place on the Food Chain
Ecologically speaking, the food chain describes the interconnected system of things eating each other in a given environment. You've probably seen a helpful illustration of this in a science textbook: grass feeds the deer who feed the wolves, and so forth.
The creature at the top of this food chain -- the ones who have no natural predators, or don't tend to get eaten by others -- are called apex predators.
Humans, thanks to our complex social structures and reliance on tools, reasoning and innovation, occupy the top of the world's food chain. We are, by every reasonable measure, the apex predators of the planet. But we come by this position a bit unusually. Unlike other apex predators like polar bears or tigers, humans are not uniquely equipped with natural weapons. On an individual basis, we are thoroughly vulnerable to predation.
This balancing act between species superiority and individual weakness has been a big part of our collective identity for a long, long time -- and it may be part of why we're so obsessed with stories about man-eating monsters. After all, man-eaters are a part of our history: tigers, lions, wolves and other predators have been known from time to time to develop a particular appetites for human flesh. And what would happen to mankind if another species showed up -- an alien, a mutant, a resurrected prehistoric creature -- to challenge our position at the top of the food chain?
Our place in the ecosystem is further complicated by our rational brains and seemingly unique capacity for speech and communication. It's one thing to kill and eat animals who are clearly intellectually inferior. But what if they could talk? Or, what if some other creature came and butchered humans the way we farm and slaughter sheep? What if we had to juggle our animal appetites with our human morality?
Once you start questioning our position in the natural order, the questions that arise start to be pure nightmare fuel...which is, of course, why they are so enduringly popular.
Fairytales and Childhood Fears of Consumption
Here's something to chew on: Being eaten is a recurring motif in folktales throughout history and across cultures, even the versions of those stories we tell to our children:
In The Three Billy Goats Gruff, a hungry troll lives under a bridge, intent to eat the goats that go trip-trapping across.
In Hansel and Gretel, two children are held captive by a witch who fattens them up for later cooking.
In Jack and the Bean Stalk, the giant is ready and willing to cook up Jack for supper.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf eats grandma and -- in some versions, anyway -- eats Red, too.
In a strange way, this fairytale cannibalism presents a gentler, more child-friendly sort of danger as described in some of the more sanitized versions of the old tales. When someone is eaten in one of these stories, they're swallowed whole and can be rescued (if a helpful woodcutter is nearby, anyway). It's a bloodless, potentially reversible but nevertheless frightening fate, a type of danger that can be compelling without traumatizing young listeners. It's also perhaps easier for youngsters to conceptualize. Even before kids have a clear grasp on life and death, they can understand eating. They eat, after all; even a toddler can understand that the things that go into his mouth seemingly disappear. Many dangers are too complex to explain to kids, but "Don't go into the woods or a monster will eat you" is a warning anyone can comprehend.
But there's a mythic significance to this idea of consumption that goes beyond boogeyman stories aimed at misbehaving children. We see it in the Bible, where Jonah is swallowed up by a whale and spends three days and nights contemplating his decisions and repenting for his sins. He's safe from drowning -- but also fully captive, mercy to the whale and God's whims alike. That same "surviving in the belly of a whale" imagery shows up in the 1883 book The Adventures of Pinocchio (and the 1940 Disney film based on it).
According to Greek myth, Cronus, a sort of proto-god, fathered the Olympians. Fearful that they would unseat him from his throne, he ate them up one by one as they were born -- all but Zeus, the youngest. His mother Rhea fed Cronus a stone instead, allowing Zeus to hide, grow up, and ultimate trick his father into regurgitating the other (apparently unharmed and now fully grown) Olympians before killing him and becoming the leader of the gods. (If the idea of "tricking someone into swallowing a stone instead of a person" sounds familiar to you, it may be because that same motif shows up in some versions of Little Red Riding Hood, where the woodcutter sews stones into the wolf and drowns him after rescuing Grandma and Red).
There are countless other examples of cannibalism and man-eating sentient monsters in folklore around the world, from Native North America's Wendigos to Slavic Baba Yaga to the wolf-king Lycaon of Arcadia (cursed for feeding his son to Zeus) -- and we'd be here forever if I delved into them all. But suffice to say that for as long as people have been telling stories, we've worried about our place in the food chain.
And from time to time, those fears may have been justified. It’s believed that the story of Hansel and Gretel originated with Germany’s Great Famine of 1315-1322 — a time when weather changes and failed crops left many families starving. Faced with too many mouths to feed and not enough available resources, we know that some people in that time resorted to infanticide, abandonment and even cannibalism. In the shadow of that real-world horror, is it so surprising that children’s stories would be so rooted in worries about being eaten?
Vore: Consumption and Intimacy
It would be impossible to explore the topics of cannibalism and consumption without touching on the internet's favorite weird fetish -- vorarephilia, aka vore, aka sexual arousal and the thought of being eaten or of eating another person.
Don't worry, though. Unlike Jeffrey Dahmer, the vast majority of vore fetishists have no interest in acting out cannibalistic acts. Oh, sure, there is the rare specimen who does -- most famously, Armin Meiwes, a German computer repair technician who killed and ate a voluntary victim he met online, an act that captured the world's attention and left the legal system scratching its head about how such things should be handled -- but most vore fetishists fantasize about human consumption in a very different way.
Vore can generally be broken out into "hard" and "soft" variants. Hard vore aligns more closely with what might otherwise be called sexual cannibalism -- it involves chewing, blood, pain and maybe even culinary activities. Soft vore is more like the fairytale version of being swallowed alive, whole and unharmed. For obvious reasons, vore is one of those fetishes that exists primarily in a fantasy sphere, explored through fiction, roleplaying, art and so forth. There's a hefty overlap between the vore community and the furry community, thanks to the existence of "predator" and "prey" species among furries and the possibilities created through size variation among animals. Popular vore fantasies might involve giants, enormous snakes, dragons, and other large-scale monsters (or else regular-size creatures and shrunken-down, mouse-sized people).
Perhaps surprisingly to some, most people interested in vore as a sexual fantasy see themselves in the "prey" role rather than the predator. They wish to be swallowed and subsumed, an act of ultimate intimacy and submission. From a certain angle, the appeal is undeniable. There is nothing more vulnerable than being eaten, nothing more sensual than total surrender. It's the same basic dynamic as any other BDSM kink, just with a different set of aesthetic sensibilities.
The internet has certainly made it easier for vores to find others to share their kinks with, just as it's facilitated the exploration of many other facets of human sexuality. It's worth noting, though, that vore-lovers are not always (and frequently not at all) interested in cannibalism as a wider trope. Indeed, for those who see vore as a gentle whole-body embrace, a protective un-birthing, or an act of pure intimacy, the idea of killing and grilling another person is downright horrifying.
A Sampler Platter of Human Delicacies (In Fiction)
Perhaps the survey of cannibalism and human consumption throughout storytelling history has just begun to whet your appetite for these tales. If so, here are a few recommendations for films and media that may satisfy your cravings.
1980's Cannibal Holocaust is a cult classic and one of the best-known examples of the "mondo film" genre, which blends real documentary footage with fiction to create something like today's "found footage" storytelling. The film, which depicts a group of American filmmakers who venture into a remote location to film a documentary only to fall afoul of a local tribe of cannibals, seems to lean hard into the colonialist mythology of the "savage." But it also takes a pretty harsh look at the filmmakers themselves, making it possible to read the film as an anti-colonialist narrative.
There's also 1973's Soylent Green, a film whose major twist is somewhat ruined by its meme status ("It's people!") but which perhaps deserves a second look in our modern era of meat replacement products and eco-horror.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) both deal with back-water hillbilly cannibal families, although the stories themselves are focused a bit more on slasher-murder tropes than the actual logistics of human consumption -- you decide for yourself whether that's a pro or a con.
If realism is more your style, you might be interested in Alive (1993), a drama based on the true story of a rugby team that crash lands in the Andes and ultimately turns to cannibalism as a means of survival. For another historically based tale (with an added dose of homo-erotic subtext), you might like 1999's Ravenous, a darkly comedic horror western.
For a more modern (and delectable) spin on cannibalism in storytelling, I heartily recommend Raw (2016), the story of a vegetarian college student whose unusual appetite is awakened after tasting meat for the first time. Equal parts coming-of-age story and tale of family dysfunction, this French-language film is a tremendous amount of fun (if you're into that sort of thing).
Of course, no discussion of fictional cannibals would be complete without a nod to Hannibal Lecter. Whether you choose to watch the classic The Silence of the Lambs, delve into the source material by reading Thomas Harris's ample backlist, or try watching Bryan Fuller's reimagining with the Hannibal TV show, it's hard to go wrong.
I also recommend these two essays about fairytale cannibalism that I found especially interesting while researching this post:
https://writinginmargins.weebly.com/home/fairy-tale-cannibals
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Cannibalism-in-Fairy-Tales
So: Which aspects of cannibalism tingle your spine or gnaw at your brain? Is it the sense of power and domination that comes from overpowering and consuming human prey? The cosmic horror of being uncertain about one's place in the galactic food chain? The intimacy of taking another person's vital essence into yourself? The slow creeping horror of discovering that the food you're consuming is not what you think it is? The deep-seated certainty that the thing following you in the dark wants to swallow you whole?
All of the above?
None?
Let me know in the comments how YOU feel about cannibalism, and don't forget to 'like' this post, share it with a friend, and subscribe for more updates delivered right to your inbox!
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