Books: Feeder By Patrick Weekes (2018)

“Lori Fisher hunts monsters. Not with a sword or a gun, but with an interdimensional creature called Handler. Together they take down “feeders”—aliens who prey on mankind. When Lori touches a feeder, Handler’s impossibly large jaws appear and drag the beast into another dimension. It’s a living—or was, until a job for the Lake Foundation goes wrong, and Lori stumbles across the Nix, a group of mutant teenagers held captive on the docks. Now the Lake Foundation is hunting Lori, and if they find Lori, they find Ben, the brother Lori would do anything to protect. There’s only one thing to do: strike first. Lori teams up with the Nix to take on Lake, and to discover why the Nix were kidnapped in the first place. But as she watches their powers unfold, Lori realizes the Nix are nothing like her. She has no powers. She has…Handler. Maybe she’s not the monster hunter after all. Maybe she’s just the bait.”

Ultimately, Feeder is a book that forces the reader to go with the flow of the narrative –the pacing starts out fast and continues throughout (a bit on that later). Weekes, oddly for this genre, spends little time explaining anything, leaving what world building there is to brief comments and random happenings. As an example, the world’s water levels have risen, leaving some cities using boats instead of cars, and no real explanation is ever given as to why this happened (global warming or aliens or something Weekes has chosen to slowly reveal over subsequent books?) and there seems to be some sort of collective brain washing that prevents people from really examining why this has happened. This can be an odd choice to foist on a reader, and might be frustrating for those who love epic world building (this book is less than 300 pages), but it does not take too much away from the fun.

It’s also clear that Patrick Weekes took the criticism he got from Rogues of the Republic fantasy trilogy –one filled with a variety of inclusive characters generally not seen in that genre- and doubled down them for Feeder. But this also causes a small part of the problem that the book does have –the narrative takes place over just five days, and there seems to be a rush to get these Nix folks and Lori paired off. Seems hollow and unrealistic (yes this is a science fiction novel, but like everything, the tales needs to run on some internal logic, or it all falls apart). So while the book is well paced, as I noted, we get little or no room for these romantic relationships to happen organically.

Also, the world building could’ve been tightened up. I’m unsure if that would effected Weekes choice to keep the pacing going (some authors get distracted by world building), but if this is going to be a start of new series, maybe he felt he did not need to reveal so much? But it was distracting at times, because I was continually pulled out of the narrative when characters said things that should’ve be elaborated on, but wasn’t. So my mind kept asking: where do the Feeders come from and why there some sort of collective amnesia effecting people about the worlds water rising?