Predatory consumption in Gema del Prado Marugán, ‘Comer con los ojos’ (2016)

Abstract

The title of Gema del Prado Marugán’s vampire story, ‘Comer con los ojos’ (2016), is an expression with no exact equivalent in English. Its literal meaning, ‘to eat with one’s eyes’, evokes the phrase ‘to feast one’s eyes on’, but has stronger connotations of lechery in the way men look at women. However, both the title and the opening of this story wrong-foot us: the story is not about lascivious ‘eating with one’s eyes’, and the opening, introducing children’s late-night computer gaming, does not lead to a message primarily about youngsters endangered by screen-based consumption. I argue that, via metaphors of looking and eating, del Prado implicitly asks whether the mass-media-fuelled concerns over what children consume online are distracting adults and thus exposing children to greater dangers, some attributed here to the Anglicization of parenting practices in Spain. I posit that this twenty-first-century tale uses the ingestion of blood to emblematize an antique fear, played out in a contemporary context: that our belief in children’s goodness and innocence may be illusory, blinding us to the fact that their lives are as pressured and unprotected as our own, their appetites as dangerous to themselves and others as ours are, and that perhaps they are quietly devouring one another away from our distracted, wilfully deluded, and hence averted gaze.