We all know happy endings, right? You know, the guy gets the girl, the girl gets a talking animal friend, the talking animal friend gets…food? You know what I mean.
Every story I’ve read or watched recently ends in disaster. The guy dies, the girl dies and even the talking animal friend dies (and that’s always the best character)! Have you ever heard of the book “Tender is the Flesh?” Well, I have, and I wish I hadn’t. A book review came up for it on my YouTube channel, and my naive brain was like, “Oh, that looks like a good book! Let me check it out! I’m sure it won’t haunt my dreams!”
Yeah, it haunted my dreams.
It’s about, like, cannibalism. This guy who kills people for meat can’t have a kid with his wife, so he has a kid with one of the humans they kill. He takes the baby, and then he just straight-up slaughters her. That’s not just creepy, it’s cruel. That guy was supposed to be the main character, and the book just ends like that. Even the cover art is creepy. It’s, like, the bottom half of a human face with the upper half of a cow face. I’m so scared of what the author’s photoshop looks like. I went to the Wikipedia page for the book, and the genre is literally, I kid you not, splatterpunk. Yeah, that’s kind of disturbing. I had to watch a million puppy videos to cure myself. A few weeks later, I googled the reviews for this book, and the majority of the reviews were five stars. Geez. I mean, aren’t they traumatized?
Short anecdote: In seventh grade, we were assigned to read The Little Mermaid. When I hear that title, I think of that redhead underwater princess and her funky little fish sidekick. But the original story from the Brothers Grimm is, let’s just say, not family-friendly (her sisters try to get Ariel to kill the prince).
Reading books is supposed to be relaxing. Real life is hard enough. You hear about terrorist attacks, armed robberies, lies, assault, racism, sexism, slurs and how much hate this world can hold in its heart. Sometimes, I just want to cover my ears and stay like that. There’s always that moment when you’re reading whatever terrible thing that’s happening in the news, and you just say to yourself, “This is hopeless. Maybe I should read something fun to take my mind off all this.” You flip open a book that offers a solution: resort to cannibalism! It’s important to keep your options open! Yeah, way better. I think everything that’s happening in the world right now is enough of a tragedy. I don’t need two star-crossed teenagers to die at the end. Keep it happy, will you? We need more of that feeling in our lives. Maybe we need a reminder that a Disney happily ever after isn’t that far-fetched after all.
