The cannibal feast: Mother for Dinner, by Shalom Auslander, reviewed

Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from a family of cannibals. Specifically, Cannibal-Americans. The Can-Ams are the most marginalised of America’s minorities, largely because of their funerary rites: when one of them dies, the relatives drain the corpse of blood and then eat it. How much of the corpse is eaten becomes a very moot point towards the end of the novel.

Seventh is so called because he’s the seventh of 13 children begotten by his mother, known to them all as Mudd.A monstrous figure, 6ft 2in tall and grotesquely obese, she has been fattening herself up for death, eating a dozen Whoppers a day for the past three years. All her children, like Seventh, are named ordinally — except the last, who as a girl ‘doesn’t count’, so is called Zero. Mudd is keen on squeezing out male heirs because she wants the Cannibal heritage tocontinue, so the chain of tradition can remain unbroken.