TL;DR: Tiffany Morris’s Carnalis is a razor-bright, unflinching triumph: erotic, disgusting, and surgically smart about class, consent, and consumption. It turns sapphic desire into a pressure cooker, then sharpens the horror with lyrical precision and real moral heat. Gorgeous, brutal, and impossible to look away from once it starts feeding.

Every chapter in this novella is named after a part of the tongue. Epiglottis. Vallate Papillae. Fungiform Papillae. Terminal Sulcus. That should tell you something, because Carnalis is obsessed with the mouth, with what goes in and what comes out: language, lies, desire, and meat. Especially meat. It wants you to feel every texture it describes, and it succeeds so thoroughly that I had to put it down twice to go stare at a wall and reconsider some recent meals.

The setup is deceptively domestic. Lauren is a wealthy, surgically perfected white woman living in Toronto with her girlfriend Alex, a Mi’kmaw ballet dancer recovering from a career-threatening knee injury. Lauren volunteers at a food co-op, plans a podcast about culinary traditions, and cooks elaborate dinners. She is also a cannibal, sourcing human flesh from a shadowy operation where desperate people “volunteer” their bodies in exchange for a brief life of comfort before slaughter. When Lauren kills her supplier and panics, she drags Alex across the country to hide out on a remote First Nations reserve with Alex’s estranged cousin, and the book becomes a pressure cooker of secrets, dependency, and escalating dread.

What makes Carnalis genuinely unnerving is not the cannibalism itself. It’s how completely Morris inhabits Lauren’s perspective. The first half locks you inside the skull of a narcissist with such airtight precision that you start to feel complicit. Lauren is always performing, always calculating the angle of her smile, the shade of blush that mimics an orgasm flush, the exact emotional leverage needed to make men do what she wants. Morris never winks at the reader. There’s no narrative safety net telling you this woman is a monster. You just feel it accumulating, sentence by sentence, in the gap between what Lauren says and what Lauren thinks. She thinks about crushing her mother’s face into a granite countertop with the same breezy internal register she uses to plan a crème brûlée. That tonal control is the engine that makes this slim book hit so far above its weight.

Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia, and Carnalis is her second novella following Green Fuse Burning, the swampcore eco-horror that earned nominations for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Indigenous Voices Award, the Ignyte, and the Aurora. She holds an MA in English from Acadia University with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature, and her poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars won the Elgin Award. Her short fiction has appeared in the landmark Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle at Night as well as Nightmare Magazine and Uncanny Magazine, among others. In a recent reading for the Brockton Writers Series, Morris talked openly about the peculiar challenges of writing a cannibal protagonist, noting her relief at no longer keeping Lauren in such close company. You can feel that in the book: an author who went somewhere genuinely uncomfortable for the work and brought back something alive and twitching. Where Green Fuse Burning channeled grief and ecological dread through Mi’kmaw cultural frameworks, Carnalis turns that same intelligence toward consumption as a metaphor for possession, extraction, and the colonial appetite that swallows people whole.

The prose is rich, sometimes almost too rich, in the way that expensive food can be almost too rich, which I suspect is entirely on purpose. Morris writes with a poet’s instinct for image and sound. The book is full of moments that lodge themselves somewhere behind your ribs: Lauren running her fingers along an exposed thoracic cage while whispering about holiness. The pink triangle of a stolen tongue tucked into a designer handbag. A bus full of sleeping strangers hurtling through minus-45 windchill on the Manitoba plains while Lauren fantasizes about survival cannibalism. And then, in the final pages, the red crack of the aurora borealis splitting open above a wrecked truck on an icy causeway, two rez dogs emerging from shadow with their teeth bared. That last image is going to live in my head for a while.

The POV shift in Part Two, when we finally get Alex’s perspective, is where the book finds its heart. Alex is everything Lauren isn’t: genuinely wounded, genuinely kind, genuinely trapped. Her grief over her dead parents, her closeted shame around her cousin’s born-again Christianity, the slow sickening realization of what Lauren has been feeding her. The scene where Alex finds the tongue in Lauren’s purse is a masterclass in condensed horror, because the dread isn’t really about the object. It’s about the five years of meals she can never un-eat. It’s about knowing, in one terrible moment, that your whole life has been built on someone else’s hunger.

If I have complaints, they’re small. The road trip midsection sags slightly, and Steve, the rideshare guy, is more function than character. A few of the anatomical-philosophical interludes about the tongue, while beautiful in isolation, slow the momentum when the plot is begging to sprint. And the book is so short that some of its thematic ambitions, particularly around class and the ethics of consent, get gestured at rather than fully excavated. But that restraint might be the right call. Morris trusts her reader to do the work, and the compression gives the whole thing a coiled, predatory energy that a longer book would have diluted.

Carnalis is mean and beautiful and smart as hell. It made me think about consumption in ways I did not ask to think about it, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Buy the shit out of this book.

Carnalis by Tiffany Morris,
published March 23, 2026 by Nictitating Books.