No More Surprise Cannibalism

I am not a morning person. In fact, often getting out of bed requires the most discipline of my day. And I work in a job where I have to be pretty buttoned up. But, if you let me, I would go to bed around midnight and wake up around 8 or 9. It would be wonderful. But I have promoted past working regular late shifts, and now I maintain a very strict habit of getting out of bed early enough to work out before work.

It is hard, and I can never skip a day, unless I am so sick I can't get out of bed. So even if I feel crappy and sad and cold and tired (I feel all of these every fucking morning), I force myself up and onto my workout.

In the winter, it's dark when I get up. It's cold, but not as cold as it could be, since I live somewhere with pretty nice winters. Still, I shuffle into the garage and do my dark winter workouts. When I work out, I listen to an audiobook. Yes, I am one of those people.

This winter I was working out in the pre-dawn darkness, listening to my audiobook when I realized, I hated the book. What book it was isn't important, but it was just so gross. The characters were awful, and the descriptions were viscerally unsettling. The hygiene of the characters, the cleanliness of of their house, the way they talked to each other... all of it made me want to puke.

Part of the problem with never actually being fully awake for a big chunk of my morning is that I exist more in the 'feels' zone rather in the analytical zone. So it took me several workout sessions of listening to this particular book to realize my bad mood wasn't simply being awake and not in my bed. I was actually really bummed out by this book.

And everyone has a sunk cause fallacy that they feed into. Mine is not stopping books even when I hate them. I tell myself it's because I'm a writer and I want to understand what isn't working for me so I can make sure to craft my writing differently. But there is a much less nuanced side to this issue.

I've been called stubborn.

By the time I realized this book was starting my day off badly, I was too far in to quit. The problem was, the book was about some totally messed up people eating other people. And it culminated with some of the cannibals up eating the other cannibals, but the kicker was, they were all biologically related.

This was totally demoralizing. After I finished it, I ended up on the phone with my brother.

"I hate cannibal books," I told him. "I'm done. I'm not reading any more."

"Ummm, you've read more than one?" he asked.

"Not like a ton..."

And then I listed several novels I'd read that involved cannibalism which I wasn't expecting.

"This seems to be a theme with you," My brother said. "You are picking these books."

And the more I thought about it, the more cannibal books I realized I'd read. And not because I'd thought I was reading a cannibal book. Rather, I'd simply found a book that sounded a little unsettling and had a good enough hook and then BAM surprise cannibalism!

But I was done. After that horrible book that I worked out to for a week, I was taking control of my reading choices. No more cannibalism.

Then this spring, I started to read a book about a female serial killer and a journalist who was trying to do a story on her. But the female serial killer was a foodie and was, as such, all about the food. And the book was a dense 400+ pages.

Once again, I was on the phone with my brother, and we were talking about what we were reading, and he stopped me and said, "It sounds like a cannibal book."

And I realized, he was right. The book did sound like a cannibalism book and in fact, a mere three months ago, I had read a similar book about a female, foodie, serial killer and it had been a surprise cannibal book.

"Oh shit," I said. "You might be right."

My brother laughed at me and told me I was doing this to myself.

And I was. I would not stop the book, I had gotten too far into it. (Spoiler, I am almost always "too far in" to stop, although there is no quantitative metric for that unit of measurement. One again, it exists in the feels zone.)

I read the rest of the book, terrified that with each turn of the page someone was going to be eating someone, and in a total turn of unexpected events, I got to the end and no one had eaten anyone.

No one was more surprised than me.

Then, this summer, I was in a bookstore when I saw a horror novel about a woman who cooks and also mysteriously lost her husband. It sounded like a feminist horror, and I read the back, thinking, I might be into this. Then I looked at the front. It showed a well manicured hand holding bloody meat. In my head, my brother's voice screamed, CANNIBALISM.

I dropped the book like it had burned me. I had finally avoided a cannibalism book. I texted my brother the cover of the book. I said, Probably cannibal book. Going to avoid it.

He replied, Highly probable.

Which made me feel a little less impressed with myself after I really stared at the cover and title for a few more moments. He'd clocked it in a matter of seconds, the undercurrent of cannibalism. But it took me reading the blurb and looking at the cover multiple times to spot the danger.

I know we all have blind spots, but if you'd asked my teenaged self, What do you think you will never see coming, despite being taught the lesson again and again? I would never have said fictional cannibalism.

Every time I try to figure out what this means about myself, I can't decide, other than I probably need to give up on more books.

If only it were that easy.