The story follows the titular character as he becomes convinced from his mother telling him ‘You are what you eat’ that his eating habits will lead him to become a living pie, which leads him to stop eating altogether. However, his mother dissuades him from this line of thinking and he begins eating again.
The story from there follows Eric as he grows up into a young man, all the while taking his mother's words to heart. Maybe a little too much to heart.
The story, while only 10 pages long, is extremely graphic and contains detailed depictions of violence against animals. It was published in the inaugural issue of Frighteners, a horror magazine, but was so controversial that the publisher pulled the issue from newsstands. (The magazine went under two issues later.)
It is also, incidentally, free to read online
via Masterton's website.
Eric The Pie contains examples of:
- Arc Words: The phrase, "you are what you eat", is repeated throughout the text. It began as a saying Eric's mother told her child often where Eric ended up taking these words to heart, especially after she clarified that food gives him life and that if he doesn't eat he dies, by devouring live animals in an increasing sadistic manner in hopes of combining their lives together with his and gain their aspects. The phrase is used to emphasize how much Eric took his mother's words to heart, with the implications of the phrase changing when he gets a taste of his own medicine at the end when sewer rats start to feast on him, realizing that he'd became a meal himself.
- Asshole Victim: Eric, a sadistic animal abuser who ate animals alive in increasingly cruel ways - including sexually assaulted a calf while eating it alive - and eats a coworker by disemboweling her ends up dies a painful, humiliating death in his own torture den, at the teeth of the very animals he tormented for so long. It could not have happened to a nicer guy.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: From cutting a cat's paws off with garden shears to stripping a Labrador's back legs of flesh (both animals are still alive when he does this!), it’s an understatement to say that Eric is unkind to God's creatures.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: As a boy, Eric encounters a calf trapped in a fence. After he breaks all of its limbs and starts biting into it, he also inexplicably begins to rape it as well, something which he does not do ever again in the story.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Any animal Eric gets his hands on as they were eaten alive in increasingly horrible ways (such as a calf that was sexually assaulted while Eric was devouring it, a dog with its hind legs' flesh missing and a cat whose stomach exploded when Eric bit down onto it and later got its head crunched by him) Eric’s coworker Deborah (whom Eric disembowels and starts to eat alive, and Eric himself gets Eaten Alive by sewer rats while being too weak to do anything about his fate. (Good riddance on that last one!)
- Determinator: Deborah Gibbs somehow has the wherewithal to jam one of Eric’s hook into his anus while being disemboweled. She followed that up by hoisting him into the air as she expires. She dies right after but it certainly wasn’t in vain.
- Eaten Alive: Eric tends to just go straight into chowing down regardless if his current meal is alive and squirming. Eric himself is afforded the same treatment courtesy of a swarm of rats, finally learning "the sin of being predatory".
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: While we don’t really see an exceptional amount of affection, Eric still clearly respects his mother enough to heed her advice (however wrong he is about it) well into his adulthood.
- From Bad to Worse: Eric starts by eating some woodlouse, and then moves onto birds, then to lesser mammals. When he’s finally an adult, he has a torture chamber in his flat full of live, mutilated animals that he periodically bites chunks out of. Then he bring his coworker home where he disembowels her and eats her organs while she watches.
- Gorn: This story is quite graphic, and has earned a small amount of infamy for that fact. There’s too many examples to list them, but the climax features Eric disemboweling his coworker Deborah, who retaliates by shoving a hook up his ass, which prompts him to scream while his head is inside her stomach.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Hoist by his own meat hook in this case, but the same principle applies. For added irony, the only reason he was hoisted in the air in the first place is because Deborah got a hold of one of the half dead animals and used it as a counterweight.
- I'm a Humanitarian: It’s kind of the logical conclusion to a story like this, really. Though, Eric only gets about half way through before things go wrong for him.
- Insane Troll Logic: Eric takes the common phrase ‘you are what you eat’ and twists it into him being able to absorb the abilities of animals if he eats them alive. How the extended torture helps is a mystery though.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Eric is aroused sexually twice in the story, both times while he’s killing something. The first time it happens, it's with an animal.
- Irony: Eric initially fears becoming a meat pie through his eating habits, so he decides to start eating live animals so that he can gain their abilities. What he didn’t realize until it was far too late for him to do anything about it was that, by that same logic, Eric would become exactly like the animals he abused; defenceless, afraid, and about to be somebody else’s lunch. Ergo, Eric really did become a meat pie.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Eric as an adult differs very little in his temperament as a child, being skittish, shocked by profanity, and giddy at the sight of his naked coworker. He also tortures and eats animals alive, and the reason his coworker is naked is because he’s stripped her down to eat her as well.
- Undignified Death: Eric gets a meat hook shoved into his anus, hung from the ceiling by said meat hook, is left dangling helplessly for a lengthy period of time before shimmying his way free, is left writhing on the ground for an even longer time, and is then abruptly devoured alive by a swarm of rats.
