BOOK REVIEW: EATERS OF THE DEAD BY KEVIN J. WETMORE

EATERS OF THE DEAD BY KEVIN J. WETMORE

12/1/2022

Wetmore’s pleasant conversational style is anything but dry and dusty, and there aren’t too many of those dreadful puns the subject of cannibalism always seems to bring out in writers and reviewers.

With his latest book Kevin J. Wetmore offers a cultural and anthropological history of “eaters of the dead”, a demographic he divides into two main categories, humans (i.e. cannibals) and “anthropophagous” monsters or other mythological beings who eat human flesh. The book also considers the “cascade of fears” surrounding the eating of dead people: the fear of being eaten, becoming an eater in turn, the unknown, starvation, corpses, and so on. As the author points out in the introduction, everyone is eaten by something, whether it be other people, carrion beasts, worms, fire, bacteria or even the sarcophagus itself, and geographically speaking cannibalism is very much a game without frontiers.

Things start gently with an interesting look at what might be considered the more civilized side of corpse disposal, with a visit to Tibet, home of the famous bya gtor, and a look at the fascinating Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians. These resourceful, humane and vulture-friendly methods of “burial” are now aspirational to a lot of Westerners, but sadly the same cannot be said of most of the practices detailed in the ensuing chapters. The tour of Ancient Greece and Rome is predictably bloody and complicated (the Cyclops and Euripides’ Bacchae feature heavily), though I certainly learnt a few things about Saint Christopher’s shady past! Other world religions don’t come in for as much attention as Christianity but the section on the Hindu Aghori had serious wow factor.

After a chapter on Beowulf, fairytales and Ogres, Wetmore gets round to dealing with some more modern writers as he traces the Middle Eastern myth of the Arabic ghul and how it travelled into the West to become the ghoul, an often-mentioned but rather diffuse figure in horror fiction. William Beckford and Edmund Lucas White are credited for introducing the myth into the West, and HP Lovecraft provides some grim humour (the teenage Howard used to cosplay as an “Arab” and even provides some dodgy ghoul art of his own!) before Wetmore goes on to explore other Western writers like Caitlin R. Kiernan. It was a shame to see the 19th-century author Fitz-James O’Brien left out since his “What Was It?” is an early, famous and remarkably creepy ghoul story, but I appreciated the literary focus of this chapter.

Next we go East to meet a host of sinister beings including the jikininki of Japan and the shape-shifting Aswang, a strange and very interesting number from the Philippines which deals in fairy-like sleight of hand in addition to the usual carnage. Then it’s back to North America and Canada for the wendigo. This was the chapter I was most looking forward to, as I love anything to do with wind and was enchanted at a young age by Algernon Blackwood’s brilliant story, The Wendigo. Wetmore rewards the Blackwood fan with an amazing two-page illustration of the tale by Matt Fox (from one of the old Weird Tales), though literary merit is not the focus here; Wetmore is more concerned with pointing out the story’s influence on other works, its factual inaccuracies and its relationship to colonialism. The topic of cultural appropriation looms large here. No effort is made to define what “appropriation” means in this kind of literary context, what is “respectful” and what isn’t, though Antonia Bird’s wendigo film Ravenous gets a clip round the ear for being set too far South (the wind may go where it listeth, but mythology, it seems, has to stay in its own backyard.) On the plus side, Wetmore provides plentiful references to modern indigenous authors (such as Armand Garnet Ruffo, Stephen Graham Jones and Daniel David Moses) so any Western readers worried about cultural imperialism can always check out their wendigos.

Finally we come to the darkest part of the book: the chapter on real-life cannibals. Things get a bit patchy here, with some great historical outbreaks of cannibalism dealt with in detail, such as the horrendous Ukrainian famine manufactured by the Soviets. The section on political cannibalism says remarkably little, however, about the more recent wars in West Africa, which are commonly associated in the Western media with routine acts of cannibalism, not all of which are sensationalist make-believe. For instance, you’d expect Alieu Kosiah, a Liberian warlord who was fingered for cannibalism by a Swiss court just this year, to make a proper appearance. This section also uses a lot of vague words like “allegedly” when it comes to discussing the crimes of people like Idi Amin, but without providing enough information about who is doing the alleging and who is disagreeing. And one of the most potentially interesting sources in this book – Cormac O Grada, who “reminds us that not all famines lead to cannibalism” – is just dropped and left hanging. But why don’t all famines lead to cannibalism? Readers want to know!

The section on pop culture was a list of the usual suspects. It put my back up straight away by quoting from the underwhelming and transphobic Silence of the Lambs film, though it is admittedly hard to think of a more recognizable quote to start the chapter. I was more disappointed that the recent comedy series The Santa Clarita Diet was only mentioned in passing, and that the intersection between cannibal narratives and feminism (or more broadly, personal liberation) is not really covered in this book (despite including a passage on Raw). That said, Wetmore’s list of movies serves as a useful jumping-off point for general readers interested in exploring the sticky world of films like Cannibal Holocaust. I also liked his more detailed section on the Donner Party, since I loved Steve Duffy’s Donner-inspired novella The Clay Party (Duffy has also written a very good Wendigo story, “The Ice Beneath Us”, which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s 2017 Best Horror of the Year anthology.)

As you have probably guessed, this is a book with a very wide scope that suffers a bit from trying to be all things to all men. It covers a whole planet’s worth of anthropology and several millennia of history, literature, and cinema, and in a work of just a few hundred pages some stuff is obviously going to fall by the wayside. It doesn’t quite make it as a coffee-table book, either, because although there are some truly wonderful pictures of medieval Hellmouths and suchlike, other pictures are just too small and badly reproduced to really give you a kick.

But from another point of view, its breadth is a selling-point. I know much more about literature than anthropology and cultural history, so I would have liked to have seen more literary content (and someone should probably tell Wetmore that Sabine Baring-Gould was a man.) On the other hand, I loved discovering all the myths, beliefs and rituals from other cultures, and this book is a trove of fun facts, no doubt about it. Wetmore’s pleasant conversational style is anything but dry and dusty, and there aren’t too many of those dreadful puns the subject of cannibalism always seems to bring out in writers and reviewers.

'Kevin Wetmore cuts to the bone with Eaters of the Dead, and serves up a wonderfully creepy insight into a shocking variety of cannibals, human and otherwise.' - Jonathan Maberry, NYT bestselling author of Relentless and Ink
'A very readable, beautifully researched and written reference work.' - John Palisano, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ghost Heart

Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our fear of being consumed is both universal and terrifying.
Kevin Wetmore explores monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, considering ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, and actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies, this book examines those that consume corpses and what they tell us about ourselves and our fears.