The Feeding by AJ Ryan
I would like to thank Orbit for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher -Orbit
Published - Out Now
Price - £9.99 paperback £5.49 ebook
Layla has spent her entire life in the Redoubt, one of the last bastions of humanity in a ravaged world. She's never been beyond the Redoubt's walls; only Crossers, with their special training and survival skills, are permitted to venture into the shadow-haunted wastelands.
When Layla's father falls ill, she knows she needs to find a cure. But no such medicine can be found within the Redoubt. Instead, her only chance is to pass a series of gruelling trials to become a Crosser, and then to strike out into the wilderness.
Where the feeders are.
Horror in the future is a concept we have seen several times. I Am Legend has set a high watermark imagining the last human versus a world now overrun by vampires (we will not discuss the movies allegedly based on it). Horror can be dystopian or political there is a focus on humanity pushed to its limits and asking itself can we survive with our better natures intact? In AJ Ryan’s dystopian horror The Feeding we have a young woman on a desperate battle to prove she is worth the honour of pricing her city but sadly for me it’s treads a familiar path and delivered nothing new to the genre.
Layla knows her father is dying and there is no cure now in the large but ever decreasing population of the Redoubt where humanity is surrounded by a wasteland and the deadly creatures known as Feeders. It’s desperation that makes her volunteer for one of the most dangerous jobs you can go for a Crosser. They are the group allowed outside to search for materials the city needs like medicine but they have a high mortality rate. She undergoes the gruelling selection process and then finds the outside world is. Even more dangerous than she expected.
My overall feeling is if you’ve never read a future horror story in book form before you may enjoy this. I however have and found this a very unoriginal and undercooked story. Layla has very little character to her and is more a plot device that things happen to. You don’t care for her father or her. The gruelling trials feel more designed to have shock value at how cruel people are to toughen you up and not actually designed to ensure your community is successful and the one interesting element the feeders are while a spin on an old classic not that unusual too. Ryan is pacy but it all feels very by the numbers and his throws in gore and bodily fluids (plus an unwelcome dog death) to give the story colour but again nothing particularly fresh comes into the story. Sadly I still found this having nothing new to say, fairly predictable and I can’t recommend it.
