The Tourist Butcher

Taken from his highly successful collection, these two stories take unconventional positions towards short story archetypes. The Tourist Butcher is an unflinching tale about a serial killer who prepares his victims for a culinary dish, while Memories in Aluminium Foil follows the nightmares and existential crisis of a psychology student who receives a slice of human brain in aluminium foil as a gift from his biologist roommate. In the original Dutch collection, Ouariachi stated that his goal was to ‘bring the short story back to the campfire’, allowing his stories to hold up a mirror to the reader, rather than telling them what to achieve. These two stories, appearing in English for the first time, demonstrate his success: he has created a pair of dark, horrifying underworlds for the reader’s mind to get lost in, whilst maintaining a language that is light and graceful.