Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the award-winning novellas Green Fuse Burning and poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars. Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. 

To the Bone: On Writing Carnalis (and an Excerpt)

When you tell people you’ve written a book about a cannibal, you get one of two reactions: an awkward flinch or a gleam of excitement. I embrace and share both reactions because I have really loved writing this book that I am also relieved to be finished writing. There were peculiar, interesting challenges in the writing process: not being too punny about food and eating, being just punny enough about food and eating, the spectre of Lecter, how cannibalism functions (and doesn’t) as a metaphor for love, for possession, for extraction. Lauren, my protagonist, was very fun to write. I’m also quite glad to not keep her in such close company anymore.

One unexpected result of writing a novella with such subject matter is that it’s hard to find an excerpt that’s fit for public consumption (okay, there’s one pun). I hope that you enjoy this (not very gory, I promise) glimpse into the pages of my new novella Carnalis, out on March 23, 2026 from Nictitating Books.

CW: mention of blood

The town was quiet with the strangled hush that tourist towns usually had in winter. The bar was a bright centre of life, golden light pouring onto the sidewalk with high snowbanks, free of any people.

She went inside. The bar itself was all lacquered wood, with a few mounted moose heads hung up unironically, their glassy black eyes frozen in a pose of perpetually blind witness. The walls also had travel pennants from the 1960s pinned up everywhere, stained yellow with decades of tobacco smoke. 

There was a strange and quaint Canadiana to the place. Tacky but earnest. Very Steve, from what she could gather from their twenty hours together. 

No one looked up when she entered, and because it was small and not very crowded, she recognized Steve’s ballcap and brown leather jacket right away.

“Steven,” she said, pulling up to the chair across from him. His eyes were red and glassy with a drunken haze.

“Jenna! Good to see ya!”

“Likewise, buddy.” 

It was meant to keep him in check, though it wasn’t like calling men her friend would stop them from hitting on her. His ruddy skin flushed a little. 

“Have a seat,” he said.

“Thanks, Steven.”

“Steve,” he corrected her, pointing the mouth of the bottle at her. “Steven is my dad and my dad’s a real asshole.”

Lauren laughed. “Hey, we have that in common.”

Lauren ordered a beer. It felt weird to drink beer, she hadn’t even been big on it in college, but if there was a place to do it, it was here in this bar, in this town, in this situation.

She made up a story about her and Megan’s upbringing. Summers at the cottage on the lake. Ghost stories and campfire s’mores. Working as camp counsellors in the summer. Losing touch through college but reuniting one random day when they ran into each other in Montreal. Steve was reasonably attentive, spent a lot of time nodding and moving between looking at her mouth and her chest. Sloppy. 

“How are you with women, Steve?” she asked.

“Why don’t we find out,” he slurred.

“I’m a lesbian.”

“Aw,” he said, disappointment giving him a hangdog expression. “Then I can tell you, honestly, not very good.”

Lauren laughed again. The beer was cold and her body was cold to the bone from the short walk and the air outside was mortuary freezing and tasted clean and fresh and chemical as a freezer and she wanted the hot taste of blood in her mouth once again. Lauren was sure that Steve must be exhausted from their long journey.

“I think you might do alright, actually,” she said. “I think you’ll do just fine.”

***

He left the bar first. That was the most important thing. Lauren timed her exit. The bartender was nowhere to be found, and everyone else seemed too drunk or absorbed in what they were doing to notice her leave. 

She followed him from a distance, his silhouette stumbling a little, occasionally sauntering sideways. 

Lauren was fast in the winter cold. She felt almost like she was floating, lighter than air, a spirit on wind. The hot bright centre of a comet ready to burn in the churning chaos of the atmosphere of some far-off, indifferent planet. Who knew what species she could make extinct in one nuclearbright crash.