Nothing but Blackened Teeth
Surprising nobody, this is my favorite Cassandra Khaw book. I love haunted house stories, and I love it when a bunch of people are stuck in an enclosed space together and all the tensions among them rise to the fore. It’s even better if they then maybe kill each other. Lol! Friendship!
The house is haunted by the ghost of a bride whose husband died on the way to the wedding. She asked the guests to bury her alive in the foundation of the house, and ever since then they buried a new girl in the walls every year. Not for an unclean spirit to eat, however! No flesh-rending in this ghost story! Does the protagonist again show an unsettling familiarity with what it might be like to eat a human, yes, but arguably “sweet as a knot of tendon after you’d gnawed on it for minutes, a faintly corrupt delight” refers to other, non-human kinds of tendon. I don’t think I have gnawed on that many tendons and found the experience to be a faintly corrupt delight, but perhaps I am deluding myself.
Anyway, Nothing but Blackened Teeth is, at last, letting its horrible monsters just kill people. Like, Jesus Christ. You don’t always have to eat them.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: n/a
The All-Consuming World
Now, The All-Consuming World is an interesting case where nobody eats human flesh, but one of the consistent fears/threats is cannibalization, a word that does not here refer to eating human flesh. Twist! In this use case, cannibalism refers to a machine schlurping into your AI mind and breaking it down into its constituent parts, which will then be used in other AI minds in the future. This makes perfect sense to me. It is not cannibalism in the classical sense (and indeed if taking out parts from one person and installing them in another person were cannibalism, then organ donation would be cannibalism too?, but I suppose it’s not perfectly analogous given that we don’t, by and large, grab people and saw out their organs to give to others), but it makes perfect sense to me.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh doing cannibalism, sort of: 10/10
Food of the Gods
Food of the Gods compiles two novellas about Rupert Wong, chef to the gods. This book kind of explains what’s going on, vis-a-vis eating human flesh. The gods are hungry for human flesh, but this is way down the list of inexplicable things the gods do in this book, and it’s not like I would know what gods wanted, you know? They’re gods, and they do unreasonable stuff, and that’s kind of that. Plus there are also ghouls that Rupert Wong is feeding, and I think ghouls canonically eat human flesh. Feels like bog-standard ghoul stuff. I’ll allow it. I’ll even allow it when Demeter says “Blood and meat is the oldest communion” and they chop up a bunch of dead unhoused people to make into delicious meals that the gods now eat. Like, fine. I assume the Eleusinian mysteries involved cannibalism more often than never.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 7/10
Breakable Things
I did not wish to impinge upon your patience to the extent of breaking down all 23 entrants in this story collection. In lieu of that, I will just say that 9 of these stories featured someone eating human flesh; 4 implied that human flesh had been eaten or was just about to be; one was debatable and I honestly couldn’t decide (“But their faces were taken along with the names of our friends, eaten, nothing but grit in the teeth of those numinous bastards” — metaphor?); and 9 definitely had no eating whatsoever of human flesh. I’m putting it in the middle because in most of those 14 stories where someone had eaten, was eating, or was about to eat, human flesh, I was clutching my face and sobbing but why wouldn’t you just kill them.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 5/10
A Song for Quiet
No flesh-eating in this book at all, and we’re going to start seeing a pattern emerge where I generally tend to like the cannibalism-forward Cassandra Khaw books less, and the not-so-cannibalism Cassandra Khaw books more. Does this speak to some slavish adherence to taboo within me? Who can say.
Although this book contains none flesh eating, I am ranking it higher than some of the others because the characters still seem uncomfortably prepared to equate human flesh with edible things. The phrase “spun the collagen and meat into spools of taffy” is said. When a character we like fades slightly, her presence is said to have been “masticated [ew] and redistributed through the noise and the hurt.” When our hero sings the song of the title, which is quite climactic of him, the song “tears out gobbets of his recollections, sucking them down, chewing.”
Why, though. Why are the gobbets. No to gobbets. Gobbets tomorrow and gobbets yesterday but never jam today. (I give all publishers blanket permission to use that sentence as a blurb for future Cassandra Khaw books. I feel it accurately captures their aesthetic.)
Degree to which I understood why the characters were [so graphically contemplating] eating human flesh: 3/10
Hammers on Bone
Our protagonist is not himself entirely human — just wearing a human body — and at one point when another character is pissing him off, he’s caught by the temptation to “eat chew eat tear / devour muscle, gobble up viscera.” It is not clear to me what this would accomplish. If someone is terrible, do you want to eat them? If a cow is an asshole, I don’t want to eat the cow. Au contraire! First of all, it would feel like a very weird flex to eat a cow that had been pissing me off. Like, it’s a cow. I am a person. I have opposable thumbs and can eat however many Oreos I want. I don’t need to eat the cow to make a point. Secondly, I don’t want to eat something I already don’t like and am mad at! Eating is a fun and nice experience, not an occasion to marinate in my grudges.
Later, he does, in fact, “bite, chew, swallow, devour” the wicked stepfather he’s been hired to stop. I get using claws and teeth to destroy the wicked stepfather when you do not have any other weapons to hand; that’s just good sense. I just… could not clearly see why one had to then swallow. Bite, yes. Chew, I don’t know, maybe? Like I guess I can see how you might get there in the heat of the moment with adrenaline. But swallow and devour? No, I do not know why this occurred.
However, it’s drawing on HP Lovecraft mythology, and maybe if I were familiar with the work of HP Lovecraft, I would also understand the necessity to eat human flesh. Let me know in the comments if the HP Lovecraft pantheon was prone to flesh-eating, please and thank you. For now I will say that I found the flesh-eating inexplicable.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 2/10
The Salt Grows Heavy
The Salt Grows Heavy broke me. The novella turns out to be a sequel to “And in Our Daughters, We Find a Voice,” a creepy mermaid story Khaw published originally in The Dark, and which is one of nine (nine!) stories in the collection Breakable Things that features someone eating human flesh, nom nom nom. However! If you were not familiar with that initial short story, which I was not, The Salt Grows Heavy was… I mean, y’all, it was so unknowable. I finished the book, got to the acknowledgements section, and flipped back to the beginning to read it again in the hopes that I would understand it better. I did not. My best advice to you all is to be wiser than me, notice that “And in Our Daughters, We Find a Voice” is printed after the acknowledgements section of this book, and read that story first.
I do not know why our protagonist was eating human flesh. I do not know why she is made stronger by eating human flesh. I understand why she is mad at everyone (the land prince captured and imprisoned her against her will), but I do not understand why this has engendered in her a desire to chomp their flesh into gobbets. I have never wanted to chomp anyone’s flesh into gobbets, never, not even when they made me properly cross, like by disregarding the lane reservation system at the swimming pool or reading over my shoulder or being Mitch McConnell.
Nevertheless, the protagonist’s motivations were as crystal unto mine eyes when compared with the villains of the piece, who set a new record even among Cassandra Khaw books for guzzling human flesh without explaining themselves one tiny bit. I read the book twice! I think I put a crack on my brain trying so hard to understand what was going on with the bezoars and the flaying and the vivisecting and the flesh-chomping. I read it twice, and if you came up to me today and said, “Jenny, those bad guys didn’t eat human flesh, they did other very nasty stuff but not that,” I would have no choice but to believe you because my reading comprehension was at an all-time low. But, honestly, I think they did eat human flesh. Going purely on probability from having read Cassandra Khaw’s other books, I think they ate human flesh. I’ll just never know why.
Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 0/10