In an alternate London, there is a pit of depravity at the heart of the city where no law can reach…. The Price of Meat by K.J. Charles is a horror novella loosely inspired by the story of Sweeney Todd. After reading Charles’s adventure-filled romance Spectred Isle, I knew I had to check out some of her darker work. And you can’t get much darker than a network of murderous cannibals in the bustling city of London….
Johanna Oakley is not the kind of woman to sit by and wait for a man to save the day. When her lover Arabella is wrongfully imprisoned by her family in Fogg’s Asylum, Johanna gets herself a tour of the madhouse and starts to plan a rescue. But Arabella isn’t the only inmate who needs help. A youth whispers through the bars to Johanna about dastardly murders at a barbershop on Fleet Street. Dressed in men’s clothing, Johanna takes on the job of shopboy to Sawney Reynard, planning to barter intel on this hotspot of crime in exchange for Colonel Jeffrey’s help in getting Arabella released. But Johanna soon finds herself entangled in a web of terrors far worse than she could have imagined. Reynard’s shop is an entrance into the underworld of Alsatia—a lawless labyrinth where the worst of London’s criminals roam free. But freedom has an ugly side: there are more people in Alsatia than there is food, and the people need to eat. Reynard has a grisly solution to this problem, and he’s only one of the many devious minds at work within Alsatia.
If a cannibalistic barber on Fleet Street sounds familiar, that’s because The Price of Meat borrows heavily from the story of Sweeney Todd. But don’t think the Broadway musical—KJ Charles is taking her cues from the original Victorian penny dreadful, The String of Pearls. In the penny dreadful, Johanna takes on a much more active role than in the musical, and Sweeney is far less romanticized. In The Price of Meat, Sawney Reynard is a clear parallel to Sweeney Todd (both Reynard and “tod” have connotations related to foxes). But he is also mashed up with the allegedly historical figure of Sawney Bean. According to local lore in Scotland, Sawney Bean was the patriarch of a populous clan that lived in remote caves and accosted travellers to rob and eat. Sawney’s story was popularized by the sensational Newgate Calendar, a tabloid-like crime catalogue that would have been published around the same time as The String of Pearls. Interestingly, both of these texts seem to exist in the world of The Price of Meat. Johanna is canny enough to recognize the connections between Sawney Reynard and these two notorious cannibals—although apparently not quite familiar enough to notice that her own name “Johanna Oakley” comes straight from the pages of The String of Pearls and that she seems to be living out part of that story.
As much as The Price of Meat borrows from other works of sensational literature, some of its strangest story elements are actually based in reality—which can sometimes be even more bizarre than fiction. The lawless region of Alsatia was a real place, albeit significantly exaggerated in this story. From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, a section of the Whitefriars neighborhood of London was privileged as a sanctuary, where criminals could take refuge from the law. They probably weren’t supported by an underground ring of cannibal chefs, though. One of the scariest elements of The Price of Meat likewise has a basis of truth. As Johanna journeys into the underworld of Alsatia, she notices that its denizens seem prone to outbursts of uncanny laughter and suspects that this is related to their habit of consuming human flesh. Sporadic laughter is indeed a symptom of the prion disease kuru, a degenerative brain disorder that can be caused by the consumption of infected human brain tissue. The disease was observed in the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, who practiced funerary cannibalism as a way of honoring their dead. Of course, Charles takes artistic license with how this disease manifests in The Price of Meat. In reality, the uncontrollable laughter symptom generally appears during the sedentary stage of kuru, when the infected individual loses much of their motor control and can no longer walk. So, don’t worry, you’re unlikely to get chased through the streets of London by maniacally laughing cannibals.
If you want to read The Price of Meat, you can find it in digital format only from various ebook providers. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comments. And feel free to recommend other chilling tales of cannibalism!