Abstract
The contemporary paranormal fantasy romance genre targeting young adult readership has experimented with an impressive variety of interspecies pairings while recycling the trope of impossible/forbidden love as a means of self-discovery. However, after the human–vampire, human–werewolf (Twilight), human–angel (Fallen), human–cyborg (Cinder), and even human– zombie (Warm Bodies) couples, the latest coming-of-age fantasy romance budding between two teenage cannibals unable to control their meat-eating impulses seems to be breaking ultimate taboos, moving towards the abjectification of the subject to showcase ultimate moral dilemmas of our times. I wish to argue that the cannibal romance as a body-genre in Linda Williams’s sense of the term disturbs our ideologically disciplined cultured embodiment to foreground raw flesh, bloody meat, tremulous corporeal intensities which unleash anarchic Dionysian impulses to perform social criticism. The narratological patterns of the heteronormative romance plot are subverted, and the compulsory open ending of “living happily ever after” is mocked in a story about violent deaths and difficult survival, foregrounding precarity, vulnerability, and remorse as formative experience of humankind. I suggest that at the end of the Anthropocene we are likely to interpret the novel as a fictional reformulation of Derrida’s ethics of eating well, an apology of the carnivorous human in the era of the sixth mass extinction and an unredeemable environmental crisis he is responsible for, and also a call for the respectful relation to the other on the plate, or at the table—but also, in a deconstructive sense, “a respect for that which cannot be eaten, cannot be assimilated in a text, that must remain indeterminate, untranslatable, a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien.” (AK)