This is my second review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for the semifinal round of SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Eat by Jesse Brown, sometimes subtitled Sigma: The Sum or ΣΔΤ Book One. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Welcome back to the food chain…

A chunk of white rested inside the dip of her collarbone. She fished it out and flicked it away, its rattle echoing as it bounced under a display table, alerting her to the silence. The ringing in her ears had finally stopped. The mask and goggles were long gone; fallen off in her haste. Pointless to wear them now, anyway…

Caede wants to complete her master’s degree, refresh her dating profile, and finally join the land of the living. Instead, she wakes up on a cold, wet pavement, surrounded by dead bodies and ferocious monsters. Kai waits anxiously for his sister to return from the world’s longest night shift. Ravi hides under a desk in his office, and Efia lays unconscious in a garage.

Jonathan, recently dumped and drinking himself to death in an empty flat, is waiting for the end to come… until a grizzly attack sends him stumbling into the path of Caede, and all the horrors of an apocalyptic London. 

My Review

Note: There are some minor spoilers about the nature of this particular apocalypse in the review below – it’s something that you find out at least in basic terms in the opening chapters, but if you want a clean read, you should probably stop here.

This is a tight, tense story set in a peri-apocalyptic London, covering only a handful of days as survivors struggle to deal with the new, shattered world created by a rogue military virus that has killed most of London’s population. The danger and the action run almost non-stop, with violent animal-human hybrids roaming the streets along with a few other survivors. The small group at the heart of the story often has to fight or flee to stay alive.

Plot and Characters

We see this world through several perspectives, including Jon, a graphic designer who was about ready to give up even before the world went to hell, Caede, a waitress and student trying to take care of her brother Kai, a nurse, a doctor, and a virologist/geneticist. We spend the most time with Jon, but we get chapters or sections from the perspective some of the other characters as well.

For me, the characters were among the strongest parts of the book. Each is different, and each has a distinct attitude and voice and manner of speaking. All are dealing with the trauma of the world ending in different ways – some with despair, some with competence, some with violence. They were an interesting group to spend the apocalypse with. There are a few spots where there’s a little bit of head-hopping or floaty perspective, but those are minor and easily followed.

Because the book is set so close to when the world ends, the characters are all reeling, trying to cope and survive (or not trying very hard), some of them clinging to what they’ve lost, others (like Luna, a side character I’d have liked to get to know a little better) seizing the opportunity to make some big changes and take initiative. In that respect, the book reminded me a little of A Quiet Place: Day One, where you see things fall apart, and there’s plenty of action and drama, but where you’re not going to get much of a sense of what new world will arise from the ashes. This was in contrast to the other post-apocalyptic SPSFC finalist I just read, St. Elspeth, which happens years after the fall, and where the workings of the new world are the point of the story.

This timing and setting means the plot, like the Quiet Place prequel, is mostly jumping from danger to danger, with the main characters having only immediate survival goals and not much of a longer perspective. That’s exciting, with plenty of gory battles and narrow escapes, but also a little limiting – I would have liked to have the characters zoom out for a little bit at least to try to figure out their new context and do some bigger-picture thinking.

My Thoughts

There’s a lot to like here, especially with the characters, who are richly drawn and interesting (although sometimes frustrating – I’m looking at you, Jon). Their relationships and banter are fun and give the story heart. Some of the characters get pushed to the side some as the story progresses – they’re present, because the protagonists wouldn’t abandon them, but they don’t really have much to do, and we stop hearing from their perspectives much. I might have preferred to hear more from them as we went, particularly Luna and Efi. Efi gets more stage time in the middle, but it would have been cool to spend some time in her head towards the end as she starts to cope with what her life has become. There’s also something really interesting going on with Caede and her mind that’s never fully explained. I was curious if that was just her psyche or if she’s been affected by the virus somehow, but it fades away after a big fight she has.

There were some parts of this that strained credulity for me a little, but that could just be me being picky, which I tend to do. The source of the human-animal hybrids is explained, including in a fair bit of detail in an epilogue-like chapter, and the rapidity of the genetic alterations required is addressed, but it still seemed like this is not something that could ever actually happen, particularly with the variety of animals incorporated and the specific traits expressed. Why are there no plant people? I know I should just accept the horror-movie premise and enjoy monstrous animal people, but I took enough biology to make me think about the details.

In addition to the science, I had a little trouble with some of the human nature bits. Nearly all of the animal-human hybrid people we meet are sadistic sociopaths. Some are mute and apparently non-sentient, so that fits, but others have descended into cannibalism and depravity within a week or two of the world ending and have abandoned all semblance of morality despite retaining their minds. Maybe that’s something the virus does to you, but it made the monsters kind of one-note. If they’re smart enough to carry on conversations and strategize, it seems like they might be thinking bigger picture rather than just picking off survivors in the rubble. Also, they don’t seem to fight each other much (with some exceptions), instead banding together on Team Chimera for reasons that aren’t really clear.

The human team we follow, too, never really has any discussion about the long term, except for a little bit on one page about laying in supplies for winter. They also have almost no discussion of the extent of the damage to the world. I know they’re focused on the immediate dangers, but I think it would be human nature to wonder if the whole world has collapsed, or if it’s just London that’s affected. Is the whole planet reduced to savagery, or is it just around the Thames? Can you find a satellite phone anywhere and call somebody? Will the British Army be rolling in once the dust settles? Are there outsiders who can help? How will we feed ourselves sustainably once the shops are looted?

One other quibble, not a big one, is that the rag-tag human survivors seem really, really competent at monster fighting and weapon-improvising, which is not a skill set I’d expect them to have (except maybe Jon, whose rugby background at least includes some physicality). Either that, or the chimeras are vastly overconfident and their danger overrated.

But all of those are nitpicks. The core of the story is a fun one, definitely reminiscent of a scary Saturday afternoon at the movies, with action, romance, loss, heroism, and emotion. There’s no shortage of excitement and drama, and Brown does a great job of providing a steady stream of action and banter and character development.

Summation

If you’re up for a bloody apocalypse book with weird creatures, human struggles, and characters you’ll care about, Eat has got you covered. Just be careful about what you inject, and don’t trust those government blokes.