I knew about Tarare before reading this book, and indeed he was a significant influence on my own character Georg, another ravenous creature in human shape. Georg is significantly more of an impossible fantasy, preferring his meals alive and whole and human, s'il vous plaît (I should say bitte; Georg is the Germanic Tarare). Even so, I see so much of Georg in this version of Tarare, it's uncanny. His sweet simplicity and innocence, his insistent hunger. Even his large-eyedness (he is described in the text as having exceptionally large blue-gray eyes, but I can't help but see and hear dark-eyed Peter Lorre speaking his dialogue. It doesn't help that I imagine Peter Lorre as everything, including Georg, but shhh).

The author of this book said in an interview that she learned to ignore the inner critic voice that said "this will be too gross for anyone." But it's actually not all gory and gross. I found a lot of it intensely sensual, and not just because of my eating fetish! I practically screamed for joy when Tarare falls asleep after gorging himself and dreams of becoming a devourer of worlds:

He gropes his way to the far wall, feeling a quickening, an unbidden rush of blood to his cock. Gropes hard and stun-blind across the stonework until his sticky fingers grasp at the handle of another door, and this he opens, goes through (being alive, feeling in the darkness, he takes himself out of his trousers with a shudder of mad pleasure) and the dawnlight comes into this cool still room through a small window, and falls on stores and pickles and jams and mustards and loaves left to cool under damp white cloth and pale soft-moon cheeses and the boy, the boy Tarare, who quivers in delight and terror of himself and his so alive life and his vast, enormous appetite— * * * In his dream, Tarare eats the whole of France. His face looms over the rooftops of thatch and red tile as the sun will loom on the Day of Judgement, laurelled in cirrus. He scoops the glassy lakes up in his hands and brings them to his mouth to drink. He prises up the wheatfields with his nails and they spiral into fuzzy ribbons, like apple peel. He sees his mother then, so far below him. She comes out of their house and lifts her face upward, and the sweet waters of the Gaude and the Bourget trickle from between his fingers and fall on to her cheeks as a life-giving rain. He grasps at the sides of a mountain and wrenches it from the earth. Holding it to his ear he hears the screams of the little people in their gaily painted houses. Skinny goats roll down the scree like crumbs, unfooted, and the geese take flight. A white swan with its wings outspread passes as a glitter across the vast darkness of his pupil. And when he is full, he sleeps, with his spine curled against the Pyrenees.