Serial Killers, Hunters & Gene 77

I hesitated picking up Jocelyn Suarez's 'The Flesh Hunters' (2021). I didn't know how this would turn out. This is the 33-year-old Singapore-based Filipino poet's debut novel. (Reviews here, here and here.)

A review described it as an "adrenaline-pumping thriller". Really now. Serial killers are fine. But apocalypse and dystopian storylines or supernatural things set in the South-east Asian or Singapore context are often... not very engaging. I gave it a shot anyway.

Set in the fictional island country of Osho, it tells the story of “people whose job it is to hunt Hunters without turning into monsters themselves,” according to our second protagonist, head pathologist Dr Amy Nishima. The Hunters are human but seemed to be driven by a violent and cannibalistic gene in their DNA which contributed to a ton of serial murders across the world. 

In this story, our main protagonist is police profiler Dr Walter Kirino, who has been tasked to help gather information to hunt down a new Hunter dubbed as 'The Highway Snatcher'. He has been hired by his new boss, Hunter Intelligence Division Chief, Aida Anton. 

Kirino has flunked all his psych evaluations and is suffering from PTSD from his last association with a Hunter who is ironically an ex-colleague and now incarcerated in a maximum security prison. That would be the ex-medical director of Yama Neurological Institute, Dr Kurenai Santa Clara. She studies Hunters, and is one herself. He was almost killed by her. Along the way, Kirino meets new colleagues and new people and start to feel less haunted and less alone. 

The author highlights the ethnic tension between the fair-skinned Oshans and indigenous dark-skinned Kaorie people. Dr Walter Kirino and his new boss Aida Anton are half-Kaorie. We got to know about The Glasgow Study that wanted to test if Gene 77 is indeed the mutation that 'creates' Hunters if the conditions are right, and a not-so-secret racially motivated desire by the head of the project to cross-check it against ethnic Kaorie people.

And then there's the case. The past couple of days had been a whirlwind of document-diving. They found four potential leads: Elon Lim, Hayako Ino, Benjamin Pascal and Ignatius Kora, all newly hired phlebotomists and mobile clinic operators doing out-of-town jobs as well as organ waste disposal. Nishima had found some evidence of missing expired organs from the Transplant Service Board ledger spanning six months, and these were the recruits around the time that the organs started going missing.

If Walter's hypothesis is correct, one of them has been stealing the expired organs and ingesting them. One of them has been using the mobile clinic to wait for his victims along the city limits. One of them is the Highway Snatcher. 

It would be a convenient cover, the mobile clinic, the medical job.

However, if Walter's hypothesis is wrong, then..

Then we meet Benjamin Pascal who works as a phlebtomist with the Transplant Service Board and runs one of their vans as a mobile clinic. He had a painful and a questionable childhood, and suffered traumatic growing years. His father was a dental surgeon and somehow he had very weird dental work done to the boy's jaw. He eventually killed his father and step-sister. He volunteered for The Glasgow Study as well and thinks the world of Dr Kurenai Santa Clara, who was the co-researcher in that study. He idolizes her.

Benjamin Pascal is the suspected new killer-wannabe-Hunter with a fondness for cats. The hints and confirmation came in the choice of names of his seven cats at home. He collects teeth from the victims to insert their canines into his mouth to create a mutated set of teeth that Hunters apparently possess. 

The author took great pains to set the stage and the narrative. The storyline is interesting, but not novel. If you're a fan of this genre, it isn't difficult to predict what comes next. Overall, it isn't a bad read. But it's very all-over-the-place. I find that the details written are too excruciating, and often, they go nowhere. There's a lot of talking, and it ends up being a bit tedious.