Book Review- Feral

Title- Feral
Author- James DeMonaco and B. K. Evenson
Published-  April 4th 2017
Genre- Science fiction, dystopian, post apocalyptic, horror
Length- 320 pages
Rating- 4/5
Synopsis (Goodreads)- Allie Hilts was still in high school when a fire at a top-secret research facility released an air-borne pathogen that quickly spread to every male on the planet, killing most. Allie witnessed every man she ever knew be consumed by fearsome symptoms: scorching fevers and internal bleeding, madness and uncontrollable violence. The world crumbled around her. No man was spared, and the few survivors were irrevocably changed. They became disturbingly strong, aggressive, and ferocious. Feral.
Three years later, Allie has joined a group of hardened survivors in an isolated, walled-in encampment. Outside the guarded walls the ferals roam free, and hunt. Allie has been noticing troubling patterns in the ferals’ movements, and a disturbing number of new faces in the wild. Something catastrophic is brewing on the horizon, and time is running out. The ferals are coming, and there is no stopping them.

Review-  I received an ARC of this from the publisher so thank you to them.

I haven’t been having the best luck with books lately so I was a bit worried about picking this up as it isn’t the type of thing I normally go for. When I read another review of this however, the reviewer mentioned that one of the authors was the writer of The Purge movie which I thought was well done so that gave me hope with this book.

This was a quick and easy read, a couple of other reviews that I’ve read claim that as this book went on it became really slow. I disagree. The pace does slow a little, but early on it is very fast so even slightly slower it is still well paced, you are never bored, there is no “down time” filled with long unnecessary explanations or descriptions, something interesting is always going on. The chapters are also quite short which I think most people agree makes a book quicker to get through.

The chapters are told from the point of view of several different characters but many/most are from the point of view of Allie, the main character. Unlike the other points of view, that of one character is often told in the past tense while discussing what is currently going on in the book. This doesn’t really seem necessary and gives away certain things, like who survives, or at least that one particular person survives. It’s not a major issue but I don’t really know why it is done when every other point of view is in the present tense.

The characters are appropriately developed. With some characters, as expected, we are given less information than with others but in those cases it wouldn’t be appropriate or necessary to know more. This is very much a plot driven, rather than character driven book.

The story itself is pretty good, no major shocks but some interesting developments. It is a little gory, there is a lot of chat about smearing blood all over everything and everyone, but given the topic of the book I suppose a little gore is to be expected. The only thing I didn’t really like in terms of the story was the “romance”. There is nothing wrong with the way it was done, it’s just something that I personally don’t really like in books. One point to do with the romance was also completely predictable but it didn’t take anything away from my enjoyment of the book.

Some of the science isn’t exactly accurate, and the genetic mutation mentioned would quite possibly give the opposite effect to that described in the book. There is a real syndrome to that described in terms of extra chromosomes, though the extra chromosome isn’t the only change in the book. The mutation described also makes something towards the end of the book potentially impossible, or at least less likely also.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it.

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