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Fleischerei
Passively suicidal and deeply masochistic, Órfhlaith numbs herself with compulsive fantasies. When she becomes infatuated with her sickly colleague, Arnaud, the pair embark on a romance of mutilation.
Fleischerei is a story about people and places that are cut into pieces; a story about ambivalence; a story about intimacy and violence.
It is a love story.
Fleischerei is a story about people and places that are cut into pieces; a story about ambivalence; a story about intimacy and violence.
It is a love story.
146 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2025
2 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin
4 books18 followersSaoirse Ní Chiaragáin is a woman of ill repute. She resides in Berlin, Germany with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 7, 2025
I'm having trouble arranging my thoughts around this book, which is not like me, but here we go! This is a thoroughly modern but also timeless story about two very broken people who come together briefly to try (and fail? and succeed?) to make some manner of wholeness and satisfaction. It is a book of contradictions--eating though you can never get full, wanting though acquiring makes you more empty, starving yourself until your body goes out of wack and contradictorily, meanly, holds on to every calorie with even more tenacity than before. Consuming your relationship (quite literally) morsel by morsel, while you see the finite amount of what remains of YOU (you yourself, and you, as a unit of two people who have come together), and can almost calculate how many bites can be had until its all gone.
And like anorexia (in which how you look is a metaphor for how much control you have exerted over the tiny corner of the universe allotted to you, aka your own body), it is about trying to hold on to the slippery illusion of self-determination in a randomly cruel life, filled with vicious individuals crowded all around you--coworkers, flatmates, boys in the village. Strangers online. These cruelties are tiny and enormous, banal and horrifying, and lost in a sea of them, the speck of Orfhlaith is pitiful and pitiable and highly sympathetic.
The author does an excellent job of weaving together the themes of flesh, doomed love, anorexia, self-destruction, and cannibalism, but one of my favorite parts of the book was the character of Berlin--the city, peeking into many scenes like a wrecked party boy who doesn't know its time to pack it up. Somehow, Chiaragáin injects so much life into a book about decaying hopes and a decaying German city, and much of that goes to the prose, which was, despite the subject matter, nimble and beautiful. Whether you're the wife of an Irish farmer in a forgotten hamlet or an unattached, un-cumbered content-moderator in a fast, metropolitan city, life will come to eat you up, so maybe you got to start eating first? A fast, disturbing little book that I highly recommend and I will definitely check out more from this author, and from this press.
And like anorexia (in which how you look is a metaphor for how much control you have exerted over the tiny corner of the universe allotted to you, aka your own body), it is about trying to hold on to the slippery illusion of self-determination in a randomly cruel life, filled with vicious individuals crowded all around you--coworkers, flatmates, boys in the village. Strangers online. These cruelties are tiny and enormous, banal and horrifying, and lost in a sea of them, the speck of Orfhlaith is pitiful and pitiable and highly sympathetic.
The author does an excellent job of weaving together the themes of flesh, doomed love, anorexia, self-destruction, and cannibalism, but one of my favorite parts of the book was the character of Berlin--the city, peeking into many scenes like a wrecked party boy who doesn't know its time to pack it up. Somehow, Chiaragáin injects so much life into a book about decaying hopes and a decaying German city, and much of that goes to the prose, which was, despite the subject matter, nimble and beautiful. Whether you're the wife of an Irish farmer in a forgotten hamlet or an unattached, un-cumbered content-moderator in a fast, metropolitan city, life will come to eat you up, so maybe you got to start eating first? A fast, disturbing little book that I highly recommend and I will definitely check out more from this author, and from this press.
July 23, 2025
*vomit noises* (but in a good way)
July 16, 2025
A sad/funny/stomach-turning look at the ways couples can pick at each other, wound each other, consume each other, both figuratively and literally, starring two lovingly realized, damaged people. Bonus points for the way Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin captures the quiet hellishness of office life, and the "naked sprint from screen to screen," as the band Parquet Courts once put it.
Read
June 27, 2025A gift from a friend, who thought I'd like it because of all the weird sex, which obviously I take as a compliment, even if cannibalism is a bit much for me (I know, so vanilla). Still, it's very good at using that arresting central concept to dramatise more recognisable problems, from the difficulty of ever quite realising a fantasy without practicality marring the moment, to the siren call of the slippery slope. And ultimately, a couple eating each other is a pretty solid – indeed, all too solid – metaphor for the give and take of any relationship, isn't it? Which you could describe as a horribly cynical way of presenting it if this weren't also so determinedly a love story. Though while we're on the genre classification, I was also amused and horrified to realise that by being set among human content moderators working in reasonable conditions in a first world city, it's historical fiction too.
June 26, 2025
I got the immense privilege of reading this one before it made it to print, and let me tell you—each one of Saoirse's books becomes my favorite.
This one, well, the experience of reading FLEISCHERREI was akin to a voyeristic fever dream. The damp bleakness, the heat, the tension between caution, reservation, cannibalism as intimacy... Perfect. No notes.
Go read it.
This one, well, the experience of reading FLEISCHERREI was akin to a voyeristic fever dream. The damp bleakness, the heat, the tension between caution, reservation, cannibalism as intimacy... Perfect. No notes.
Go read it.
June 24, 2025
You ever relate so much to a character’s internal thoughts that you’re wondering how someone could see your hidden ugly heart? And what if that character is from a horror/LOVE story about cannibalism? I am so grateful to know Saoirse, who has broken my bloody heart in two! Honestly, this little book got under my skin in the best way. Oh, a character struggling with an eating disorder, feeling isolated in Germany, with a complex relationship between self-harm and intimacy? All my demons on the page in front of me. Cathartic, honest, raw. Damn, ok!!
October 18, 2025
BWAF Score: 9/10
If the word “meat” makes you squirm, Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin will flay you open like a sausage casing and stuff your insides with rot. This novella locks you overnight in a butcher shop run by Kafka and Clive Barker, where the air is thick with blood, grief, and primal hunger. It’s visceral, it’s feminine, it’s political, and it’s absolutely deranged in the best possible way. Ní Chiaragáin is not yet a household name in horror, but she should be. If there’s any justice in the literary world (spoiler: there isn’t, but we keep hoping), Fleischerei will launch her into the pantheon of weird fiction heavyweights. Think Mariana Enríquez wielding a scalpel instead of a pen. Think Carmen Maria Machado if she traded lush dream logic for wet, red realism. Ní Chiaragáin brings a scorching political sensibility, an Irish Catholic ghost-guilt, and a barbed-wire prose style that carves as much as it illuminates.
Nominally, Fleischerei follows Orthlaith (her Irish name which her colleagues struggle to pronounce), a woman working a soul-crushing job as a content moderator in Berlin. But this is no humble workplace narrative. The titular Fleischerei (German for “butcher’s”) is not a literal shop but a metaphorical arena, a memory palace, a grotesque Eden where Orthlaith’s psyche unravels. The novella is set against the backdrop of Berlin’s urban decay and historical echoes, with its past as a slaughterhouse complex between Storkower Straße and Landsberger Allee seeping into the narrative. Orthlaith’s job involves sifting through a digital abattoir of violent and explicit content, a task that mirrors the physical and emotional butchery she endures in her personal life, particularly in her relationship with Arnaud, a frail, enigmatic coworker.
The story is less about plot than sensation. Orthlaith’s days are a grind of repetitive tasks, scroll, flag, delete, repeat, punctuated by increasingly disturbing fantasies, memories, or hallucinations. Her fixation on Arnaud evolves from obsession to a grotesque mutual consumption. The narrative spirals into a stew of meat, blood, sex, power, and grief, with Berlin’s swampy summer heat and Orthlaith’s precarious living situation in a mold-ridden Plattenbau amplifying the sense of decay. A forbidden “Room” looms in her psyche, much like the locked door in a fairy tale, representing the unspeakable truths she cannot face.
Fleischerei doesn’t spoon-feed you anything. It gives you sinew and expects you to chew. The novella’s structure is fragmented, mirroring Orthlaith’s disintegrating reality. Chapters like “Evisceration” and “Post-Mortem” are less chronological markers than emotional states, each plunging deeper into her psyche. Ní Chiaragáin’s refusal to hand-hold makes the reading experience both challenging and rewarding, demanding active engagement from the reader to piece together the narrative’s jagged edges.
Let’s unpack the themes, because Fleischerei is bloated with them, each one dripping with blood and meaning:
- Meat as metaphor: At its core, this is a story about commodification—of animals, bodies, and trauma. Meat isn’t just food; it’s flesh, it’s labor, it’s survival. The line between human and animal is razor-thin, deliberately blurred through Orthlaith’s and Arnaud’s… acts. Women’s bodies are the centerpiece of this metaphor: packaged, consumed, desired, dismembered. Orthlaith’s body, once fat and later lean from self-starvation and excision, is a battleground for societal expectations and personal punishment. Ní Chiaragáin isn’t subtle, she grabs you by the jowls and makes you look at the violence of consumption, from the slaughterhouses of Berlin’s past to the digital meat market Orthlaith moderates.
- Work, burnout, and bodily dissociation: The content moderation job is a grotesque parody of modern labor. Orthlaith is stripped of personhood, her identity reduced to a desk opposite Arnaud’s, her body contorted to endure the physical toll of sitting and staring at screens. This echoes anti-capitalist horror like Sorry to Bother You, where work doesn’t just demand your soul but devours it. The novella’s climax underscores the disposability of workers in a system that chews them up and spits them out.
- Motherhood and grief: A deep well of sorrow runs beneath Orthlaith’s meat-slick exterior. Without giving too much away, the butchery becomes a form of penance, a way to process guilt and loss. Orthlaith’s tasks, cutting, cleaning, sewing wounds, are devotional, echoing Catholic rituals of suffering and redemption. Her fixation on Arnaud, imagining him starving and controlling her, reflects a desire to be absolved through submission.
- Language, power, and repression: Ní Chiaragáin’s prose obsessively circles the failure of language. Orthlaith struggles to articulate her pain, her name mispronounced by colleagues, her desires gagged by shame. The novella is preoccupied with the unspeakable—not in a Lovecraftian sense of cosmic horror, but in the raw, human agony of grief and trauma. When Orthlaith bites a girl’s tongue in a frenzied bathroom encounter, it’s a desperate attempt to consume and silence, to bridge the gap between self and other through violence.
Ní Chiaragáin writes with surgical precision, her prose both dangerously fast and thick with rot. Consider this line: “The meat knows. It remembers touch.” It’s chilling, evoking the sentience of flesh and the permanence of trauma. Another gem: “I am reaching and he is sucking at me, like the sod around my boots in the fields, so warm and tight.” The language is raw, tactile, and stripped down, mirroring the physicality of butchery. Even as the story veers into surrealism, the texture remains grounded, every word sticky with blood and iron.
The novella’s ambition is staggering. Its stylistic specificity, blending Irish lyricism with Berlin’s gritty realism, sets it apart in the horror landscape. Yet, it won’t be for everyone. The nonlinear storytelling, with its dreamlike shifts between past and present, can disorient. The refusal to moralize or offer closure—Orthlaith’s final act is neither triumphant nor redemptive—may frustrate readers craving resolution. Some symbolism, like the surgical video that triggers Arnaud or the deer-mirror dream, risks feeling heavy-handed. The relentless dread, unbroken by levity, is exhausting, though this seems intentional, reflecting Orthlaith’s unyielding pain.
Fleischerei knows what horror is for: not just fear, but transformation. It forces you to confront the body, its fragility, its desires, its capacity for violence. Orthlaith’s journey is one of self-destruction and reclamation, her final act a grotesque assertion of agency. The novella’s feminist undercurrent is fierce, exposing how women’s bodies are consumed by lovers, workplaces, and society, yet it avoids didacticism, letting the horror speak for itself.
TL;DR: Fleischerei is a beautiful abattoir of a book that’s dark, daring, and dripping with originality. Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin has written one of the most brutal, brilliant pieces of horror fiction this year. You’ll want to throw it across the room, then pick it up and read it again.
Recommended for: Sickos that like their horror brutal, their metaphors meaty, and their prose with an arterial spray.
Not recommended for : Those squeamish about blood, grief, or the commodification of female trauma. Or if you just really love sausage and don’t want to think about where it comes from.
If the word “meat” makes you squirm, Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin will flay you open like a sausage casing and stuff your insides with rot. This novella locks you overnight in a butcher shop run by Kafka and Clive Barker, where the air is thick with blood, grief, and primal hunger. It’s visceral, it’s feminine, it’s political, and it’s absolutely deranged in the best possible way. Ní Chiaragáin is not yet a household name in horror, but she should be. If there’s any justice in the literary world (spoiler: there isn’t, but we keep hoping), Fleischerei will launch her into the pantheon of weird fiction heavyweights. Think Mariana Enríquez wielding a scalpel instead of a pen. Think Carmen Maria Machado if she traded lush dream logic for wet, red realism. Ní Chiaragáin brings a scorching political sensibility, an Irish Catholic ghost-guilt, and a barbed-wire prose style that carves as much as it illuminates.
Nominally, Fleischerei follows Orthlaith (her Irish name which her colleagues struggle to pronounce), a woman working a soul-crushing job as a content moderator in Berlin. But this is no humble workplace narrative. The titular Fleischerei (German for “butcher’s”) is not a literal shop but a metaphorical arena, a memory palace, a grotesque Eden where Orthlaith’s psyche unravels. The novella is set against the backdrop of Berlin’s urban decay and historical echoes, with its past as a slaughterhouse complex between Storkower Straße and Landsberger Allee seeping into the narrative. Orthlaith’s job involves sifting through a digital abattoir of violent and explicit content, a task that mirrors the physical and emotional butchery she endures in her personal life, particularly in her relationship with Arnaud, a frail, enigmatic coworker.
The story is less about plot than sensation. Orthlaith’s days are a grind of repetitive tasks, scroll, flag, delete, repeat, punctuated by increasingly disturbing fantasies, memories, or hallucinations. Her fixation on Arnaud evolves from obsession to a grotesque mutual consumption. The narrative spirals into a stew of meat, blood, sex, power, and grief, with Berlin’s swampy summer heat and Orthlaith’s precarious living situation in a mold-ridden Plattenbau amplifying the sense of decay. A forbidden “Room” looms in her psyche, much like the locked door in a fairy tale, representing the unspeakable truths she cannot face.
Fleischerei doesn’t spoon-feed you anything. It gives you sinew and expects you to chew. The novella’s structure is fragmented, mirroring Orthlaith’s disintegrating reality. Chapters like “Evisceration” and “Post-Mortem” are less chronological markers than emotional states, each plunging deeper into her psyche. Ní Chiaragáin’s refusal to hand-hold makes the reading experience both challenging and rewarding, demanding active engagement from the reader to piece together the narrative’s jagged edges.
Let’s unpack the themes, because Fleischerei is bloated with them, each one dripping with blood and meaning:
- Meat as metaphor: At its core, this is a story about commodification—of animals, bodies, and trauma. Meat isn’t just food; it’s flesh, it’s labor, it’s survival. The line between human and animal is razor-thin, deliberately blurred through Orthlaith’s and Arnaud’s… acts. Women’s bodies are the centerpiece of this metaphor: packaged, consumed, desired, dismembered. Orthlaith’s body, once fat and later lean from self-starvation and excision, is a battleground for societal expectations and personal punishment. Ní Chiaragáin isn’t subtle, she grabs you by the jowls and makes you look at the violence of consumption, from the slaughterhouses of Berlin’s past to the digital meat market Orthlaith moderates.
- Work, burnout, and bodily dissociation: The content moderation job is a grotesque parody of modern labor. Orthlaith is stripped of personhood, her identity reduced to a desk opposite Arnaud’s, her body contorted to endure the physical toll of sitting and staring at screens. This echoes anti-capitalist horror like Sorry to Bother You, where work doesn’t just demand your soul but devours it. The novella’s climax underscores the disposability of workers in a system that chews them up and spits them out.
- Motherhood and grief: A deep well of sorrow runs beneath Orthlaith’s meat-slick exterior. Without giving too much away, the butchery becomes a form of penance, a way to process guilt and loss. Orthlaith’s tasks, cutting, cleaning, sewing wounds, are devotional, echoing Catholic rituals of suffering and redemption. Her fixation on Arnaud, imagining him starving and controlling her, reflects a desire to be absolved through submission.
- Language, power, and repression: Ní Chiaragáin’s prose obsessively circles the failure of language. Orthlaith struggles to articulate her pain, her name mispronounced by colleagues, her desires gagged by shame. The novella is preoccupied with the unspeakable—not in a Lovecraftian sense of cosmic horror, but in the raw, human agony of grief and trauma. When Orthlaith bites a girl’s tongue in a frenzied bathroom encounter, it’s a desperate attempt to consume and silence, to bridge the gap between self and other through violence.
Ní Chiaragáin writes with surgical precision, her prose both dangerously fast and thick with rot. Consider this line: “The meat knows. It remembers touch.” It’s chilling, evoking the sentience of flesh and the permanence of trauma. Another gem: “I am reaching and he is sucking at me, like the sod around my boots in the fields, so warm and tight.” The language is raw, tactile, and stripped down, mirroring the physicality of butchery. Even as the story veers into surrealism, the texture remains grounded, every word sticky with blood and iron.
The novella’s ambition is staggering. Its stylistic specificity, blending Irish lyricism with Berlin’s gritty realism, sets it apart in the horror landscape. Yet, it won’t be for everyone. The nonlinear storytelling, with its dreamlike shifts between past and present, can disorient. The refusal to moralize or offer closure—Orthlaith’s final act is neither triumphant nor redemptive—may frustrate readers craving resolution. Some symbolism, like the surgical video that triggers Arnaud or the deer-mirror dream, risks feeling heavy-handed. The relentless dread, unbroken by levity, is exhausting, though this seems intentional, reflecting Orthlaith’s unyielding pain.
Fleischerei knows what horror is for: not just fear, but transformation. It forces you to confront the body, its fragility, its desires, its capacity for violence. Orthlaith’s journey is one of self-destruction and reclamation, her final act a grotesque assertion of agency. The novella’s feminist undercurrent is fierce, exposing how women’s bodies are consumed by lovers, workplaces, and society, yet it avoids didacticism, letting the horror speak for itself.
TL;DR: Fleischerei is a beautiful abattoir of a book that’s dark, daring, and dripping with originality. Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin has written one of the most brutal, brilliant pieces of horror fiction this year. You’ll want to throw it across the room, then pick it up and read it again.
Recommended for: Sickos that like their horror brutal, their metaphors meaty, and their prose with an arterial spray.
Not recommended for : Those squeamish about blood, grief, or the commodification of female trauma. Or if you just really love sausage and don’t want to think about where it comes from.
Read
August 19, 2025Fleischerei is quite different and far more experimental than Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin's previous novel Wax & Wane, which I really dig, but don't take that as a negative. From a character perspective, it quite reminded me of Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik.
July 25, 2025
Gorgeous, cutting prose, and a story that's actively unpleasant in a deeply engaging, human way. I dug this one a lot!
August 3, 2025
repulsive and skin-crawling but in a horny, existential way. amazing.
August 19, 2025
juss a cute lil tiny book with a heart on the cover 🥰
January 6, 2026
Perverse is too light of a word to describe this book, however, I ate every second of it. TW: cannibalism, SH, suicide, Ana, sexual assault
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews