Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017. Jonathan Lyon
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JONATHAN LYON was born in 1991 in London. He studied at Oxford University, graduating in 2013. He moved to Berlin the same year where he now works as a musician and writer. He has had a chronic illness for over a decade. Carnivore is his debut novel.
For anyone who’s been ill too long.
Contents
‘What’s your fantasy?’
All sex and storytelling starts with this, of course. Sometimes the question’s self-directed, sometimes it’s only implied. But here, obviously, I was supposed to reply ‘being dominated,’ so that’s what I said.
I was actually fantasising about eating a satsuma, slowly, slice by slice, on the edge of a rooftop, or perhaps on a hilltop, watching a building below me burn in a fire I’d started. But this would be too long to say aloud, and probably wouldn’t arouse a man in the prime of his mid-life crisis as easily as a boy begging for a beating.
So now that my victim thought that I was his victim, he could breathe more heavily, and began struggling to unbutton his shirt.
‘No, no you should be doing this,’ he said, fluttering his fingers. ‘I mean, undress me, boy!’
Unsuited to the dominant role, he recoiled at his own orders. Clearly, he was a submissive – if I’d had the energy, I could’ve had him on all fours in a few minutes. But energy is not one of my vices.
‘Of course, sir,’ I said instead, my mouth twitching into a smile I had to hide by lowering my head.
Beneath his shirt was a paunch of greying hairs. As I removed the rest of his clothes, he hovered awkwardly between sitting and standing, his hands just above my back, not yet confident enough to touch me.
‘Now, now… you!’
I took off my tracksuit – the uniform he’d requested – delivered my finest doe-eyed simper, and knelt down. But he rejected this arrangement and instead dragged me upwards onto the bed.
‘No time for that… boy. Let’s get to the point.’
He forced my face into the pillow and I began to moan in a way that would make him hard. Perhaps he hoped I’d feel a kind of shame in this, but ‘this’ meant nothing.
‘This’ was merely boring, but it was worth a thousand