A Feast of Flesh and Blood

"A mother awaiting her son’s return discovers his personal ad soliciting the services of a cannibal (and fears the worst). " -- from summary.

Fawkes, Jen. "Well-Built Men, 18 to 30, Who Would Like to Be Eaten by Me." Mannequin and Wife: Stories. Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/77121.

"In mythology, religion, and literature, there are many examples of cannibalism that have been passed down over the centuries and which do not strike us as shocking as long as they remain fixed in a symbolic context. Things only become problematic when cannibalistic impulses are taken literally and put into practice. Apart from situations of extreme emergency in which this rare phenomenon might enjoy a certain sympathy, it also occurs within the context of serious sexual offences. Recently, in Germany, there was the case of a man who used the internet to find a person who wanted to have himself eaten. The victim’s consent unsettled not only the public at large, but also the judiciary, which at first did not know how the case was legally to be appropriately assessed. In a first trial in January 2004, the man was sentenced to a comparatively short prison term of only a few years, a sentence that was lifted by the Federal Supreme Court. In a fresh trial in May 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In this essay, I discuss to what extent mythological, religious, and artistic models of cannibalism express something fundamentally anthropological and how concrete examples should be assessed against this background." -- from abstract.

Pfäfflin, F. Good Enough To Eat. Arch Sex Behav 37, 286–293 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7

"Olley examines cannibalism in old Norse myth and legend, where the consumer is related in some way to the victim being consumed. In such instances, rather than distinguishing and separating between two cultural or taxonomic groupings, cannibalism disturbingly redoubles the propinquity of two persons who are already related. It is the social and the interpersonal impacts of kin-cannibalism which register most strongly, rather than the religious or the political aspects. Indeed, despite the modern tendency to specifically about the cannibalistic practices of the sixteenth-century Tupinamba of East Amazonia, present-day Brazil, which, he suggested, were concerned with incorporating not the substance of the victim being consumed, but rather their condition or position in relation to the consumer: 'not extended matter, but intellectual relation.'" -- from record description.

Olley, Katherine Marie. “Co-Presence and Consumption: Eating Kin(ship) In Old Norse Myth And Legend.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 120, no. 4, 2021, pp. 490–515, https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.120.4.0490.

"This article analyses prominent examples of the Wendigo myth in modern North American horror media and the implications of misappropriation by non-Indigenous creators for non-Indigenous audiences. This article's cross-media analysis covers television, film and game media; Teen Wolf (2011-17), Supernatural (2005-20), Bruce Wemple's The Retreat (2020) and SuperMassive Games' Until Dawn (2015). This analysis will trace the process of these media, made by non-Indigenous white creators, removing the Wendigo's indigeneity and placing it within fictional settings as an antagonist. I have named this observation of the Wendigo the 'Caveless Creature' phenomenon. The paper concludes that employing the Wendigo as a caveless creature is a common practice within horror as it easily creates a villain for white protagonists to defeat repeatedly. This construction is problematic in the horror genre as it presents an Indigenous antagonist that poses a threat to white culture for its otherness and indigeneity - while at the same time, misappropriating, discarding and demonising the Indigenous culture the myth comes from, at whim. Although this article is specifically observing the Wendigo, I argue that it is one of many caveless creatures, and the treatment of them by creators of non-Indigenous horror genre should be analysed in the future." -- from abstract.

Johnson, Francesca. “A Creature Without a Cave.” Reinvention, vol. 15, no. S1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.31273/reinvention.v15iS1.906.