José María Tamparillas, “El sabor de la buena tierra” [The Taste of Good Earth] (2010); “Sangre de mi sangre, carne de mi carne” [Blood of my Blood, Flesh of my Flesh] (2012); and “La vieja, muy vieja Betty” [Old, Very Old Betty] (2012)

Born in 1970 in Zaragoza, Jose Maria Tamparillas has a well-established position among Spanish writers of horror fiction, but is not a big name outside that specialist area. He has numerous stories published online, in magazines and anthologies, and a sole-authored collection, Carne de mi carne. A boy of undisclosed age, but presumably around eight or nine, is the focalizer of this story, which opens with his encounter at the end of the school day with a strange yet somehow familiar man who is eating handfuls of soil and who tells the boy that this calms his ravenous hunger when he cannot get what he really likes to eat. This story is narrated by a seventeen-year-old boy who pays a visit he finds disturbing to his paternal grandfather, now in an old-age home and close to death, incontinent, and suffering from terminal cancer. The eponymous protagonist of this story is a former horror-film star who is old and decrepit.