THE MEAT HUNTER

A serial killer targets those who remorselessly mistreat pigs in this debut novel. 

Molly Bishop grew up on a pig farm and was horrified by her father’s indifference to the lives of his animals—to him, they were “unrecognizable as anything other than slabs of flesh to be consumed by a ravenous society.” Embittered by his cruelty, she makes a mission of finding others similarly insensitive to the suffering of animals—in particular, pigs—and hunts them down to kill them unrepentantly. Paradoxically, she works for a pharmaceutical company that specializes in drugs used on pigs, a job that provides her contact with plenty of potential homicide victims. She turns out to be as calculating as she in insane. After murdering a father and son—both callous tormenters of pigs—she arranges the scene of the crime to make it seem as if the younger man killed his parent in a cataclysmic rage. As the bodies begin to pile up and she becomes increasingly more careless—intoxicated with the thrill of murder—Michael Lair, an FBI agent, traces her tracks. Allen builds her dark thriller around three characters: Molly, Lair, and Johnny Grimm, a deranged killer who pursues Molly after she violently rejects his advances. Lair is a fascinatingly complex character, talented and arrogant but also stung by professional disgrace after a shootout gone terribly wrong. The author provocatively shines klieg lights on the most macabre practices of the meat industry and intelligently questions the hierarchical distinction between the value of human versus animal life. Molly is a deeply layered character despite her flippancy: “Complicated, aggressive, menacing.” As chilling a figure as Molly is, she’s also alluringly vulnerable, empathetic, and philosophically pensive: “Have you ever felt that way about an animal? You know, made it different somehow, like it was privileged and had a right to live while everyone around it was sentenced to die?” The surprise denouement of the story is thrillingly climactic but equally implausible. Nevertheless, the novel remains a gripping read. 

A smartly morbid, thoughtful meditation on animal cruelty.