Meat
Joseph D'Lacey's 2008 horror novel is set in Abyrne, a town cut off from the rest of the world and ruled jointly by a fundamentalist church and the Magnus Meat Processing plant that feeds it. The town's entire theology and economy are built on the slaughter and consumption of the Chosen, mute cattle-like beings whose meat is treated as a sacrament. Richard Shanti is the plant's most efficient stunner, the man who drops the Chosen before they reach the killing floor, and he is also a vegetarian who can no longer keep the contradiction down. As Shanti's faith curdles and a handful of dissenters begin to suspect the truth about what the Chosen really are, the church and the plant move to crush them. D'Lacey wrote a fierce, gory parable about industrial meat that earned a public endorsement from Stephen King and a long afterlife in horror circles.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Meat
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Abyrne is an isolated town where everything depends on Magnus's meat plant. The cattle, called the Chosen, look more human the longer you watch them. A devout slaughterman starts to ask the wrong questions.
Yes. Meat is a 2008 horror novel about a town built on industrial slaughter, and it's widely cited as a key example of vegetarian horror. Stephen King praised the novel publicly.
Yes. Meat (2008) and Tender Is the Flesh (2017) share themes about industrial meat processing, dehumanization, and body horror. Many readers recommend both as paired reads in the food-horror subgenre.
Meat was written by Joseph D'Lacey, published in 2008 by Heyne.
Meat is 344 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Meat takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Meat is a standalone novel by Joseph D'Lacey, not part of a series.
Meat is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.