I got my first inklings that Feral, by James DeMonaco (creator of The Purge franchise) and BK Evenson, was going to be a troublesome narrative right from the very start. Allie, a high school girl who the male authors want to make sure we understand sleeps in the nude, wakes up to a text message prompting her to click an innocuous link, which ends up taking her to a site where she can watch her best friend having sex. It’s clear to Allie that her friend is being secretly filmed, and she’s awfully gutted over this discovery. Thankfully, after Allie tells her friend that the boyfriend had invaded her privacy, secretly filmed them having sex, and then mass mailed the video to their entire high school, the bestie is totally OK with all this! It’s awesome news, in fact, the bestest thing ever since chocolate and Pornhub. She’s gonna be so popular now, like OMG! And then, on an otherwise completely unrelated note, the apocalypse hits.
So, look, I had some issues with Feral. In order to discuss them, I’m going to issue a BIG OL’ SPOILER WARNING FOR HERE ON OUT. Please consider yourself warned. Cool? Cool.
Come to the blog if you want the spoiler.
On the narrative front, Feral is a steaming, mendacious, tone-deaf pile of scat. On the narration front, it’s actually pretty well done and the story’s shifting points-of-view are told by different women. Structurally, this book is also a mess, with some chapters in third-person omniscient and others in first-person, usually for little rhyme or reason, and mostly just because, with occasional narration shift between Allie and Kim, when the authors or Allie can spare a moment’s thought for the poor, burgeoning twelve-year-old actress. The narrators are solid and adept in their readings, and I didn’t find any flaws in their delivery of the material or in the production of the audiobook itself. I just wish they would have had far better material to narrate.
Feral is well-packaged and well-narrated, but ultimately it’s just not very good. At its core, it’s essentially little more than poorly done Young Adult fiction strapped into a zombie harness. There are no shocks and even fewer surprises, other than how badly this whole damn mess was conceived and executed.
Audiobook was purchased for review by the ABR.
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