Playing with Their Food
Review of The Flesh Hunters by Jocelyn Suarez (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2021)
By Stewart Dorward
Jocelyn Suarez writes poetry, prose, and spoken word. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, but The Flesh Hunters, long-listed for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, is her debut novel. It comes from a fascination with psychopaths, monster-based folklore, and how we “other” those who are neurologically distinct from the mainstream into figures that we think can never be us. In an interview with Time Out, Suarez shared that when “[writing] this book, I was toying with the idea of a psychopath, but a lot worse. A sickness, a genetic anomaly, a species. All these describe Hunters.” The question that the novel focuses on is, what are these people and should they be held responsible for their actions?
The Flesh Hunters is a brisk, violent, and dark thriller about “people whose job it is to hunt Hunters without turning into monsters themselves,” according to a character, Detective Nishima. The Hunters are a new breed of cannibalistic serial killers that have emerged in the last decade across the world. The story is set in the small fictional island country of Osho, one that blends the many cultures of Asia, but is dominated by Japanese immigrants, who have pushed the indigenous Kaorie people to the mountain regions. To my mind, Osho seems to be modeled on Taiwan and its large mountainous aboriginal communities with a history of head hunting and intercommunal violence. The difference in the fiction seems to be that Osho was settled by the Japanese Fujiwara clan and the indigenous people carry Spanish names, such as Guzman or Santa Clara, as might be found in the Philippines.
It is pleasant to see too that while Suarez is a big fan of the usual mystery greats—Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie—her book is not a traditional whodunit. With Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes, there is never any doubt that the killer will be identified and it won’t be the hero of the story. Faith in these infallible fictional detectives is fostered throughout the stories. In contrast, when readers are a fifth of the way into The Flesh Hunters, we are told who the killer is and then why the Hunters are killing, how they are doing it, where the killings are taking place and when. We see the current killer interacting with colleagues and future victims. This is far more than the police know at this point in the story. We are even given psychological background to the killer. This novel isn’t a puzzle to be solved but an unanswered question. What are the Hunters? In this, no amount of omniscience helps us to answer
Early in the story, a leading scholar on the Hunters, Dr. Mikhail, outlines the different ways that the Hunters have been portrayed in popular culture: “From the satyr to half-man, half-beast therianthropes to personified demons to fallen angels that take Lucifer, once the brightest angel in heaven felled by pride, to finally, the common man. Or rather, woman.” The last reference is to Dr. Kurenai Santa Clara, the most recently caught Hunter, nicknamed the Harbour View Butcher. The doctor was a leading researcher into the Hunters and was part of the police team tasked with tracking them down. She also befriended and later tortured one of her colleagues, leaving him with literal and psychological scars. This colleague, Walter Kirino, carries these wounds with him in the current investigation, and they cloud his narrative when he is speaking to us. Here is another breach with the convention of the infallible detective narrator.
There is an underlying racial tension between the Japanese and Kaorie communities that simmers throughout The Flesh Hunters. In the past, research into the Hunter phenomenon had resulted in Kaorie suspects being rounded up, experimented on, and killed under a government-funded program. Kirino, one of the protagonists, is himself half-Kaorie, and the victims of the Highway Snatcher—his quarry—are all Kaorie, picked off the highway as they commute between the capital and their families in Yama. Race is pivotal to their victim profiles, and the idea of defining and separating victims and Hunters resonates throughout Suarez’s narrative. The police believe that the Hunters are some kind of self-torturing, self-divided monsters. Suarez continually challenges that easy explanation by suggesting that the killer could again be a cop, as was Dr. Santa Clara in the Harbour View Butcher case.
Since the plot is laid out for us, the writing has to carry the reader. Fortunately, Suarez does so with evocative descriptions, tense mood-setting, and well-developed characters. We start at the ramshackle home of the scarred investigator, Walter Kirino, and the unannounced visit of his new colleague, Amy Nishima. The house is in a cul-de-sac at the edge of the National University, next to an abandoned student dormitory and an empty parking lot. It is a soot-black building, covered with algae and weeds. The floor creaks under Amy’s feet, and Walter wakes up, surrounded by empty beer bottles. Walter asks, “You’re not here to murder me, are you?” Amy doesn’t answer directly, setting the tone of mutual suspicion. Since a leading member of the previous team turned out to be the killer, is history repeating itself? Seven chapters later, detailed echoes of this opening setting appear when Walter makes his own unannounced visit to Dr. Hektor Mikhail, his new supervisor. The imagery unites the two scenes but it raises more intriguing questions about the characters than it answers.
Another way in which tension is maintained is through the characters’ reliance on non-verbal communication. Characters often rely on reading each other’s expressions to get closer to the truth. They even depend on smelling the other person’s scent, as befits hunters and those who hunt them. When the lead investigator of the police team Aida Anton (Chief Aida) visits Dr. Santa Clara held in a detention facility, she is detected by the latter by her smell.
As they reach the end of the hall, Aida feels the temperature grow cooler and wonders if it’s just her. The hair on the back of her neck stands up.
“I’ve always wondered if that honey smell is a fragrance of yours or just the aroma of your skin,” she says. Dr Kurenai Santa Clara stands in the middle of a grey prison cell. She is wearing white canvas overalls, her hands cuffed behind her. Her long hair spills like gleaming black ink around her shoulders. She looks at Aida with a familiar open smile, her left brown-green eye gleaming against the sunlight streaming into her cell, her right raven eye a pit of nothing.
The orderly gestures for Aida to stop a few steps away from the cell. Then he stands back, watching them.
This scene between Dr. Santa Clara and Chief Aida reminds the reader of the meeting between Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. In that horror classic, a cannibalistic serial killer is also interviewed by an investigator seeking help in tracking down a new killer. In Harris’s writing, the scene rings of implausibility. That a rookie detective would be sent alone to interview such a killer is beyond belief. Besides, the scene is a textbook example of the male gaze as the powerful older male humiliates the vulnerable young inexperienced female. In Suarez’s scene, there are similar points of choreography. The walk down the hallway in the prison, the convicted killer confidently waiting in the center of their cell, facing the bars and analyzing the scent of the approaching officer. But Suarez gives us a meeting between two professional women at the peak of their powers. This is a clash of equally powerful wills.
It could also be that some of Harris’s background research for Hannibal Lector helped to inspire the character of Dr. Santa Clara. Hannibal Lector was based on another doctor with a Spanish language name, Dr. Alfredo Ballí Treviño. He was nicknamed the “Wolfman of Nuevo León” for his gruesome murder and dismemberment of his lover who was also a professional colleague. Similarly, Dr. Santa Clara tries to kill her lover and colleague, Walter. There are other signs of Treviño’s influence on The Flesh Hunters. For example, his nickname “Wolfman” echoes Dr. Mikhail’s earlier lecture on the nature of Hunters, and Dr. Treviño’s preferred method of killing is close to that of the “Highway Snatcher,” namely picking up people from the highway and dismembering them.
Overall, what gives both Harris’s and Suarez’s killers power as characters is that they are drawn sympathetically. Harris describes Hannibal “with a respect that conveys an understanding that humans are unfathomably complex and that even the evilest people can have a good side.” Likewise, The Flesh Hunters shows that the Highway Snatcher is loved by their family and respected by their colleagues. They even rescue feral cats. Likewise, while in prison Dr. Alfredo Ballí Treviño ran a free clinic for the poor. After he was released, he practiced medicine, albeit unlicensed, in one of the poorest areas in Monterey, California, until he died of natural causes in 2010. By portraying the Hunters not as animal but human in their violence, Suarez creates a compelling and thought-provoking world in her brisk plot.
Stewart Dorward is a retired high school teacher living in the mountains north of Tokyo with his husband where he runs an Airbnb, grows vegetables, teaches cooking, and practices Zen Buddhism.
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