When the Meat Starts Talking

Howie's father has a lesson for him after the incident with the mare, and it is delivered the way lessons are delivered in this world — quietly, at close range, hand on the shoulder. "She was a beast and a beast's got no soul," he tells his son. "You thought different — for just a minute, anyway. Not now, though." The scene reads like ordinary rural parenting, a father walking a boy back from a moment of shame. It is also, the novel will make clear a few hundred pages on, the exact mechanism by which an entire population gets sorted into "stock." The word does not arrive by decree. It arrives at the dinner table, passed down the way grammar is passed down, until the boy who flinched at bestiality can watch breeding pens full of "gravid and heavy-breasted" fourteen-year-olds and feel only revulsion at their smell.

Chapter 20 is where the sorting cracks. Howie sits down to break