The Flesh Eaters – L.A. Morse
Warner Books – 1979

I first saw the title of this book on the Too Much Horror Fiction blog’s list of favourites. I didn’t actually read the review, but the title alone was enough for me to put it on my to-read list. I found a copy recently and devoured it in two sittings.

I’m pretty happy that I knew nothing about this book before I started it. It’s based on Sawney Bean, a legendary Scottish cannibal. Historical fiction is not something that interests me, and if I had known this was based on a “true story”, I might have been deterred.

The story of Sawney Bean is probably just a legend, and Morse doesn’t stray far from the usual account. The attraction of this book however, is not its historical accuracy; it is the scenes of brutal violence and perversity. It has cannibalism, rape, incest, and torture, and it has them in abundance. The book is called The Flesh Eaters, so I was expecting it to be exploitative, but I was pretty surprised by the end of the first chapter when a young girl helps stab her father death and then rolls around having sex in a pool of his blood.

It gets worse too. This is an excruciatingly horrible book. It’s written in the present tense, and this makes it feel like watching an utterly Hellish episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I went back and read Too Much Horror Fiction’s review after finishing it, and absolutely agree with Will’s claim that The Flesh Eaters is “a must for every horror fan who likes horror fiction nasty, brutish, and short.” Hell yeah.