MEAT by Joseph D'lacey
I've pursued a career in fiction for the last seven years. Seven novels and fifty short stories later, I'm breathing down its neck. My short stuff has appeared online, in anthologies and magazines. I produce fairly bizarre tales – Sci-fi, Horror, Fantasy - with a hint of mischief.The great news is I’ve just signed my first publishing contract for a full-length work of fiction. The book is titled Meat and it’s out in March ’08, published by Bloody Books .
Anyone trying to break into writing fiction professionally will have an idea of how this made me feel…Meat is a very dark horror tale set in the post-cataclysmic town of Abyrne, somewhere in England and possibly not too far away. I don’t want to say too much about the story for fear of spoiling it – suffice it to say the title is entirely apt.
Perhaps it’s better to say what inspired me to write this tale:
There’s nothing like a double-standard to get the imagination cranked up. How, I asked myself, could so many of us be eating so much meat each week and yet have little or no understanding of where it comes from? How many of us, I wondered, could actually kill, gut, skin, dress AND cook an animal by ourselves? And these kinds of question came faster and faster. They collided with other ideas I’d had for stories and suddenly – WHAM – I’m writing my next novel.
It wasn’t easy though…
Imagine trawling the internet for info on factory farming, animal cruelty and footage of real slaughterhouses. It turned my stomach. At one point I stopped writing the novel it disgusted me so much. I can assure you now that, while it absolutely does NOT occur in every farm or slaughterhouse, animal mistreatment and misery is widespread. In countries where demands for meat are high, abattoirs run night and day to keep up. Slaughterhouse work is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in America.
I’ll leave what happens in an abattoir to your imagination until the book comes out but let me ask you this: Could you do it?
And here’s another question: What if it wasn’t animals being slaughtered but…something else instead?