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Carnalis
Wealthy party girl Lauren hungers for human flesh. Her girlfriend Alex, a recently injured dancer, is trapped in Lauren's toxic and deadly spiral. The looming threat of capture may prove to be less dangerous than Lauren herself and the lengths she will go to satiate her needs. Will Alex be next on the menu?
157 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 23, 2026
About the author
Tiffany Morris
38 books170 followersTiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 9, 2026
Review soon!
March 20, 2026
Sapphic desire served rare
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10
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.
Read if you want sapphic horror that’s sexy, disgusting, and mean about wealth pretending it’s love.
Skip if you hate intimate power-imbalance dynamics and relationships that curdle fast.
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10
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.
Read if you want sapphic horror that’s sexy, disgusting, and mean about wealth pretending it’s love.
Skip if you hate intimate power-imbalance dynamics and relationships that curdle fast.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 12, 2026
A delicious little novella, and a refreshing take on the cannibalism genre.
April 3, 2026
Short but definitely packs a punch. Lauren is a women from a wealthy family with a particular appetite. She has connections to "ethically sourced" meat. Which is to say, there is an organization that arranges comfortable final days to individuals who consent to their bodies being eaten upon death. Lauren has a girlfriend Alex, a ballerina who recently tore her ACL. The story follows their relationship and all its toxic traits and power imbalances as Lauren gets herself in trouble with her meat dealer and the two of them flee Toronto to Alex's cousins house to an isolated town in rural Manitoba.
Morris is such an incredible writer that it took me a minute to remember that Lauren is a despicable person. I guess in a lot of ways I was similiar to Alex by being hoodwinked by Lauren. It's when we enter Alex's POV (which was my favourite and such a pleasant surprise) that seeing her from a different perspective we can see Lauren as the selfish, arrogant person she is. Alex was such a great character and felt like such a genuine and authentic person. Morris always seems to breathe freshness into her stories (because we can all agree there has been an influx of cannibal stories) that they feel unique. It helps that her prose is just such a pleasure to read as well.
If you love cannibal stories and/or toxic lesbians than you should definitely should check this one out.
Thank you to the author and Nictitating books for the free arc in exchange for my review.
Morris is such an incredible writer that it took me a minute to remember that Lauren is a despicable person. I guess in a lot of ways I was similiar to Alex by being hoodwinked by Lauren. It's when we enter Alex's POV (which was my favourite and such a pleasant surprise) that seeing her from a different perspective we can see Lauren as the selfish, arrogant person she is. Alex was such a great character and felt like such a genuine and authentic person. Morris always seems to breathe freshness into her stories (because we can all agree there has been an influx of cannibal stories) that they feel unique. It helps that her prose is just such a pleasure to read as well.
If you love cannibal stories and/or toxic lesbians than you should definitely should check this one out.
Thank you to the author and Nictitating books for the free arc in exchange for my review.
January 31, 2026
I was super excited to receive an ARC of Carnalis! (Thank you Tiffany Morris 😍) I LOVED Green Fuse Burning, so I went in confident I’d devour whatever Morris served up next, and this novella did not disappoint. Where her previous work leaned swamp-core, Carnalis sharpens its teeth and goes straight for cannibalism with a disturbingly original twist.
In this world, humans can volunteer themselves as ethically sourced meat. They agree to live out their final days in comfort - well housed, well fed, free of worry - until someone with an insatiable appetite, like Lauren, pays to consume them. The real horror is that Lauren’s girlfriend, Alex, has no idea about Lauren’s hunger for human flesh, and watching that secret fester is deliciously unsettling. I enjoyed the story at every turn, though I found myself wishing the volunteers had been explored a bit more, I was really intrigued (& also disturbed) by that aspect. Lauren, meanwhile, starts off unhinged and only gets worse, and as things escalate, I couldn’t help but worry for Alex. The tension is slow-burning, intimate and hard to shake.
What also elevates the story, is how Morris weaves in sharp commentary on class, race, gender identity, eating disorders, cultural colonialism (with Lauren as white and Alex as Mi’kmaw/Indigenous), and toxic relationships - all without dulling the blade of the narrative. And her prose is to die for! Lyrical, lush, and impossible not to fall in love with. I especially loved the use of the tongue’s anatomy as chapter headers - you’ll understand why once you sink your teeth in 👀
This dark little novella is absolutely worth your time, there’s a surprising amount to savor in so few pages, and I’m already hungry for more from this author.
In this world, humans can volunteer themselves as ethically sourced meat. They agree to live out their final days in comfort - well housed, well fed, free of worry - until someone with an insatiable appetite, like Lauren, pays to consume them. The real horror is that Lauren’s girlfriend, Alex, has no idea about Lauren’s hunger for human flesh, and watching that secret fester is deliciously unsettling. I enjoyed the story at every turn, though I found myself wishing the volunteers had been explored a bit more, I was really intrigued (& also disturbed) by that aspect. Lauren, meanwhile, starts off unhinged and only gets worse, and as things escalate, I couldn’t help but worry for Alex. The tension is slow-burning, intimate and hard to shake.
What also elevates the story, is how Morris weaves in sharp commentary on class, race, gender identity, eating disorders, cultural colonialism (with Lauren as white and Alex as Mi’kmaw/Indigenous), and toxic relationships - all without dulling the blade of the narrative. And her prose is to die for! Lyrical, lush, and impossible not to fall in love with. I especially loved the use of the tongue’s anatomy as chapter headers - you’ll understand why once you sink your teeth in 👀
This dark little novella is absolutely worth your time, there’s a surprising amount to savor in so few pages, and I’m already hungry for more from this author.
April 6, 2026
3.5⭐️ rounded down
April 12, 2026
A bloody adventure that will satiate your darkest fears and have you cringe at the sound of crunching on (let us say) a little snack. From Green Fuse Burning to Carnalis I am once again enamored by Morris engaging and affluent writing style that will keep you trembling until the very last page. A very sapphic and very lesbian tale packed into this action filled novella. From the first page you are invited into the twisted mind of what this relationship entails. What would be your limit before you run away from your loved ones deepest and darkest secrets?
Think Tender is the Flesh meets a sapphic adventure. Each detail is bloody and beautifully written to disgust your senses. You will find yourself flinching to the extent of detail being so real. A true metaphor for some toxic relationships and the how quickly a relationship can spiral into darkness. I love Morris approach to metaphor’s and the way she creates horror that really resonates with people. These are the stories that stick with you – even for a novella there is so much to think about when it is over.
Morris poetic prose is utterly unique to herself and how she approaches writing. She is underrated in the horror genre and hopes to see more of her narratives soon. She writes with conviction and unapologetically. You bet I checked out every song on her playlist at the end that I did not know. I absolutely enjoyed this one and displaying it right next to my copy of Green Fuse Burning. All opinions are my own.
For tarot readings, recommendations, and reviews, visit my blog https://brujerialibrary.wordpress.com/
Think Tender is the Flesh meets a sapphic adventure. Each detail is bloody and beautifully written to disgust your senses. You will find yourself flinching to the extent of detail being so real. A true metaphor for some toxic relationships and the how quickly a relationship can spiral into darkness. I love Morris approach to metaphor’s and the way she creates horror that really resonates with people. These are the stories that stick with you – even for a novella there is so much to think about when it is over.
Morris poetic prose is utterly unique to herself and how she approaches writing. She is underrated in the horror genre and hopes to see more of her narratives soon. She writes with conviction and unapologetically. You bet I checked out every song on her playlist at the end that I did not know. I absolutely enjoyed this one and displaying it right next to my copy of Green Fuse Burning. All opinions are my own.
For tarot readings, recommendations, and reviews, visit my blog https://brujerialibrary.wordpress.com/
Review of advance copy received from Author
A masterful investigation of embodied trauma, class exploitation, and the insidious impacts of colonialism, this all-meat story gives the reader plenty to chew on.
In delicious prose, Tiffany Morris delves deep into the horrors of toxic relationships. Carnalis explores relationships to flesh, whether it’s between blood relatives, through sensual encounters, or preparing and consuming meat. Lauren experiences all three in a visceral and destructive way.
Lauren is a compelling villain, holding on to her humanity by a thread. As the stakes increase, Alex begins to suspect that something isn’t quite right about her girlfriend’s nighttime disappearances. Alex’s physical pain and dependence on Lauren is another way that Morris explores the carnal in this extremely well-crafted story.
As tender as it is disturbing, Carnalis will leave you hungry for more.
In delicious prose, Tiffany Morris delves deep into the horrors of toxic relationships. Carnalis explores relationships to flesh, whether it’s between blood relatives, through sensual encounters, or preparing and consuming meat. Lauren experiences all three in a visceral and destructive way.
Lauren is a compelling villain, holding on to her humanity by a thread. As the stakes increase, Alex begins to suspect that something isn’t quite right about her girlfriend’s nighttime disappearances. Alex’s physical pain and dependence on Lauren is another way that Morris explores the carnal in this extremely well-crafted story.
As tender as it is disturbing, Carnalis will leave you hungry for more.
March 10, 2026
Another absolute BANGER of a novel by Tiffany Morris. I'm not shy for my love about books with cannibalism so I was FLOORED when one of my fave authors (TM) reached out and asked if I wanted to ARC read this book!!!! I wanted to highlight SO many things in this. Tiffany has such a way with words that the story sinks its teeth into you and doesn't let go. I was also obsessed with our main character, Lauren. The unhinged (often times unreliable aka my fave) woman that she was. AND THE ENDING?! So good. No doubt this was 5 stars, one of my top reads this month, this year - ALL TIME. Y'all thought I wouldn't shut up about Green Fuse Burning?! That was nothing to the way I'm going to be yelling and yapping about this one.
**Thank you so much Tiffany for an ARC of this with no strings attached, this review is all of my own doing cause I need everyone to be HYPED about this book!
**Thank you so much Tiffany for an ARC of this with no strings attached, this review is all of my own doing cause I need everyone to be HYPED about this book!
November 13, 2025
“She knew, as he did, that you could only truly know something by devouring it.”
Tiffany Morris has done it again!
This book gripped me from the very start, and I couldn’t help but devour it (pun intended). Morris’s use of prose envelopes us in her characters’ mindsets. I was chilled by Lauren’s calculated use of mouth and throat - and tongue, but that’s a different context. Alex has a grip on my heart.
I received an ARC copy of this book, but cannot wait to revisit this again when it’s released. Going to come back to this one again and again.
In a word: delicious.
Tiffany Morris has done it again!
This book gripped me from the very start, and I couldn’t help but devour it (pun intended). Morris’s use of prose envelopes us in her characters’ mindsets. I was chilled by Lauren’s calculated use of mouth and throat - and tongue, but that’s a different context. Alex has a grip on my heart.
I received an ARC copy of this book, but cannot wait to revisit this again when it’s released. Going to come back to this one again and again.
In a word: delicious.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 5, 2026
This was the first book of Tiffany Morris's that I had read, and I am going to read Green Fuse Burning right away. I loved the writing here, how it would move into a more poetic register at certain times. Also loved the variety of cultural and artistic references. The book was erotic and romantic at times--though definitely horrific as well! Attend to content notes if you're squeamish at all!
March 31, 2026
3.25 stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews