Opening
A nightmare jolts Marcos Tejo awake into a world where the GGB virus has outlawed animal meat and legalized the breeding, slaughter, and consumption of humans. He performs his job at the Krieg Processing Plant with expert efficiency, yet his grief and disgust keep breaking through the euphemisms that smooth this reality.
What Happens
Chapter 1
Marcos wakes from dreams of the slaughter line, stuck on the words that define his work: carcass, stunner, slaughter. He remembers the “Transition,” when the state rebrands human beings as “special meat,” “product,” and “head,” an early signal of The Power of Language and Euphemism. At home, the silence echoes. His wife, Cecilia, has left, and the empty rooms intensify his insomnia.
Memories crowd in: the panic of the outbreak, the burning of pets, the first secret cannibalism, the slow normalization. He thinks of his father, Don Armando, whose dementia swallows him as society changes, and of the theory Marcos dares not voice—that the virus is a cover for population control. His private horror wrestles with public compliance, intertwining with Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization.
Chapter 2
On the road to the HIFU Tannery, Marcos cycles through his justification: he is good at this, the money is excellent, and his father’s care is expensive—an early portrait of Complicity and Moral Corruption. Señor Urami receives him in a pristine office hung with Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, fixating on Saint Bartholomew’s flayed skin like a brand sample.
Urami lectures on transport, storage, and the fine points of skin quality, repeating that defects are avoidable and profit is precise. “Everything is reflected in the skin,” he says, distilling Dehumanization and Objectification into an aesthetic. He requests “black skins” for fashion and leaves Marcos with a folder of samples—and rumors that Urami flayed people even before the Transition.
Chapter 3
Marcos visits Tod Voldelig, where El Gringo runs a breeding center with clumsy efficiency. He tours a German buyer, Egmont Schrei, through barns and pens, explaining the “teaser stud” for identifying fertile females and boasting about his First Generation Pure stock—humans born and bred in captivity. Vocal cords are removed: “meat doesn’t talk.”
The tour grows more brutal. Marcos sees pregnant females amputated to keep fetuses alive. El Gringo slices a sample from a living female with a biopsy tool for Schrei to taste. The visit ends with a barbecue where the workers roast a “kid” to celebrate a birth. Marcos confronts El Gringo over sick shipments and skin damage, handing him Urami’s sample folder; the business grinds on, every correction aimed at maximizing yield.
Chapter 4
At home, Marcos lingers over a child’s cot that once was his and later his son’s. Its smiling animals mark a vanished life and a family in pieces. He knows he should dispose of it before Cecilia returns but can’t bring himself to lift it.
A truck from Tod Voldelig interrupts. The driver announces a “gift” from El Gringo: a living FGP female. Marcos refuses—he kills, he doesn’t raise—but the driver, terrified of his boss, ties her to a tree, leaves her papers, and flees. Marcos stands with a life he is expected to treat as inventory.
Chapter 5
Marcos calls El Gringo, who chirpily confirms the “luxury” gift: an FGP female fed an almond-based diet. If Marcos wants, El Gringo can send men to slaughter her; Marcos bristles—if he does it, he’ll do it himself. The “gift” doubles as a business obligation.
Seething, Marcos brings the trembling, urinating female into his barn and ties her to a rusted truck. He searches his kitchen and finds the only “human” food he keeps: a bowl of leftover white rice. He gives her rice and water, locks the door, and leaves for work. The small gesture—feeding her as a person, not as livestock—cracks his practiced detachment and sets the novel’s central conflict in motion.
Character Development
Marcos’s professional control frays as personal grief collides with a living “product.” The arrival of the FGP female forces him from abstract complicity into direct responsibility.
- Marcos Tejo: Efficient, numb, and isolated; haunted by his son’s death and his father’s decline. His choice to feed the female marks the first outward sign of inner revolt.
- El Gringo: A blunt avatar of the new order; treats humans as assets, sees the gift as goodwill, never as a moral provocation.
- Señor Urami: Cultivated, chilling, and exacting; aestheticizes cruelty and turns human skin into luxury material.
Themes & Symbols
Language reshapes reality here. Bureaucratic terms—special meat, head, product—erase personhood and make atrocity sound technical. The book’s plain, clinical diction mirrors a society that replaces compassion with process. Complicity flows through economics and care: Marcos accepts his role to fund his father’s nursing home, illustrating how survival pressures rationalize violence.
Dehumanization reaches an industrial peak at the tannery and breeding center, where optimization replaces ethics. Personal grief leaks into this system—Marcos’s cot and his insomnia insist that life still has weight, even as the world treats it as material.
- The Cot: A relic of love, loss, and a former moral order; a quiet counterweight to the slaughterhouse logic.
- The Flayed Saint Bartholomew: A grotesque art object that turns pain into décor, signaling cruelty disguised as refinement.
- The FGP Female: The catalyst of Marcos’s crisis; her presence makes his choices immediate and visible.
Key Quotes
“carcass, stunner, slaughter line.”
These words pin Marcos inside his work’s lexicon and show how vocabulary structures perception. The blunt list strips away humanity and trains the mind to think in parts and processes.
“Everything is reflected in the skin.”
Urami’s credo fuses aesthetics with profit. Skin becomes a ledger of value, not a boundary of personhood, revealing how the system prizes surfaces over lives.
“meat doesn’t talk.”
El Gringo reduces silence to a management solution. Mutilation becomes quality control, turning voice—the sign of personhood—into a defect to remove.
He believes in a theory that some people have tried to talk about. But those who have done so publicly have been silenced... He thinks it was all staged to reduce overpopulation.
This suspicion exposes cracks in the official story and intensifies Marcos’s torment. If the premise is a lie, his complicity becomes not just survival but participation in a designed atrocity.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the machinery of a plausible, bureaucratic dystopia and locate the novel’s true battlefield inside its protagonist. The industry’s logistics—breeding, transport, tanning—make horror routine; the FGP female makes it personal. Marcos’s small act of recognition at the barn door turns a professional habit into a moral test, launching the story’s central struggle: whether he can reclaim his humanity by acknowledging hers.