"Under the Skin" by Michel Faber

Isserley drives along the A9 seeking well-built male hitch-hikers. She picks them up, chats to them to make sure they have no-one who will search for them, sedates them and drives them to a lonely farmhouse on Scotland's Eastern shore. There they are castrated, their tongues are removed and they are fattened up. In a month they will be butchered and their meat shipped back to the alien planet from which Isserley comes.

 But Isserley's polluted planet with its regimented society contrasts unfavourably with the Earth: she has never known free oxygen and free water from the sky. Her job, hunting hitchers, causes her stress and the pain of the operations she was forced through to look at least approximately human (and hideous in her eyes) causes her agonising pain. Then the gorgeous son of the boss comes to visit; he is a vegetarian and wants to put an end to this monstrous trade.

On p203 the sensitive hitch-hiker just after the wannabe rapist quotes 'oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive" and attributes it to Shakespeare when actually it was Sir Walter Scott. SURELY A SCOT WOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT!!!!!!

Sorry. Geek moment. Over now.

A macabre tale exploring the morality of eating meat with hints of much deeper issues.

April 2011; 296 pages