Cover Image: Feed Them Silence

Feed Them Silence

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Member Reviews

Book Summary:

Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon is one of the most determined scientists you'll meet. She's fascinated by animals and their perception. As such, she's found a way to combine neurological interfaces with these animals, understanding them directly.

This discovery has opened the door to a secret desire of Dr. Kell-Luddon. She wants to see, feel, and smell through a wolf. She wants to know what it is like to be a wolf running through the woods.

Unfortunately, this obsession with the minds of others does come at a cost. Primarily, it pulls her further from the humans around her – especially her wife. Which would you choose if given a chance?

My Review:

Okay, so I was a bit hesitant to dive into this one; I'm not going to lie. You never know how a horror story involving animals will go, so I tend to lean on the side of caution. That said, I'm glad I overcame my fear and read Feed Them Silence.

In a sense, most of us can sympathize with Dr. Sean's goals, at least at first. As with the story of Captain Ahab, there is such a thing as going too far. Of chasing our dreams until they turn into obsessions.

Naturally, most people miss the moment when this happens. Only viewing it from the outside makes it possible. In Sean's case, I felt chills running down my spine as I watched her chase after her wolfish dream.

This was an excellent read, despite all my hesitations if you're like me and are debating about reading Feed Them Silence, stop hesitating!

Highlights:
Science Fiction
Horror Novella
LGBT+

Trigger Warnings:
Animals

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Rating: Absolutely Loved It, 5 stars

This is a rather weird near-future sort of sci-fi/cli-fi-y horror novella. And I loved it. I just finished it and it has left me feeling deeply unsettled.

I feel like I resonate deeply with the project that is highlighted in this novella. Sean is a researcher who has wondered her whole life what it is like to be part of a wolf pack, and she has finally gained the opportunity to find out. There is a neural link that allows her into the mind and feelings of a wolf three times a day, leading her to deeply empathize with her wolf and look forward to that time.

However, there are a lot of ethical implications of this that are explored in the flashbacks with her wife's objections to the project in the grant stage to some of the reflections at the end of the novella. I think that this is going to be something that sits with me for a good long while.

In this we watch Sean throw herself into her work in search of the close and intimate bond of the pack, all the while neglecting the intimate bond she has with her partner. We see the fallout in her relationship of not being willing to put in the work to maintain it, alongside the impacts of the project, both in Sean's brain and emotions as well as on the wolf pack she studies.

I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilers, but this was a very impactful, well-written novella that I devoured in a few hours. I think I would recommend this to others who may have wondered at the possibility of sharing minds with an animal. I feel like it has made me examine myself a bit closer.

Thank you to Netgalley and Tordotcom for an early review copy in exchange for an honest review (even if life events kept me from finishing prior to publication date).

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A corporate funded science project that involves a neural interface connection between a human and a wolf. The project is supposedly about conservation, but the head scientist has always wanted to know what it was like to be a wolf and the corporate backers are just interested in the commercial potential.
This was an interesting short novel that held my attention even though the main character is mostly unlikeable. When she’s inside the mind of her wolf, it is impossible for her to maintain any objectivity. Very readable.

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I loved this uncomfortable tale of a marriage dissolving. The characters are flawed in relatable ways. The ethics and relationships shape the story. A tense, introspective read!

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Grateful for the galley copy of this Mandelo short. Having read Summer Sons and really enjoyed it, I was curious about the follow-up potential. Esp in a pretty different premise and approach. Feed them Silence had a great concept at its core and intertwined the right amount of personal hurdles and events along the way. The central character was really solid and kept me turning pages to see where and how she'd go next. Good interplay between a scientific concept and the humanity and emotional tugs that life and events bring.
Worked as a short story. Nice seeing Lee Mandelo having range while maintaining some core of his voice.

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Feed Them Silence is a beautifully written, fascinating novella, that I wound up deciding not to finish because it was making me too darn sad. The ethical debate about research on animals, and the deterioration of the protagonist's marriage were both well handled as well, but for me the wolf content was just hitting too close to my heart right now. I might try this one again in the future.

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thank you to tor for providing me with a proof copy!

for most of this book i had no idea where it was going. i thought maybe it was going to get gory with sean and the wolves, or there would be some kind of wolf involvement in sean’s life, but erm, no. it just didn’t really go anywhere. there wasn’t a satisfactory ending (which isn’t necessary) but there wasn’t any ambiguity either. it feels like it just stopped at an arbitrary point and that’s all.

i think riya was my favourite character because she seemed like she had her head on straight, while sean was thinking/acting like she was jesus. the inclusion of a lesbian married couple as the main protagonist and her family was very cool, as was the fact that the women were both older (i believe in their fifties?) and that i believe one or two side characters were nonbinary. i had hoped for discussion about trans and queer people in stem, and the barriers they face, but i only found one line that referred to this. about halfway through the book, riya experiences something traumatic, and i have to be honest and say i didn’t see the point. it seemed like the author just wanted to include a thought on the refugee crisis so threw in a tiny detail about a character we don’t meet nor has any bearing on the wider story. in the end, that plot point doesn’t have any affect on anything else in the book so it came across as rather cheap to me.

i thought the first 50ish pages could’ve done with a bit of an edit, and having the Slow pace at the start move to a Slow-Medium pace then a Medium Slow pace and then back to Slow made the book drag rather than carry itself along on its momentum.


trigger warning - animal death
(view spoiler)
i wasn’t quite prepared for the animal harm in this book, so please be prepared for content such as animal death, surgery, animal pain, experimentation on animals, etc. i do wonder if that was supposed to be the horror element on the book, but it wasn’t horrifying in that it was creepy or eerie or scary, it was just sad and uncomfy (but not in the fun horror way).

i think this book had a tonne of potential to go in very slasher vibe ways to poke fun at the genre, or contemplative horror discussing capitalism and the price of progress, or about climate change and the monstrosity of the world as it is. unfortunately this just felt one note to me all the way through. the one thing i really loved about this novella however was the writing and the prose. some sentences were so beautiful i had to put the book down to ponder them for a moment. i loved the language and the descriptions, it did feel like we as the reader were aware of every sound, smell, thought, experience that sean had at times and that made for a very immersive experience. overall that wasn’t enough to carry the book for me though. i haven’t yet read another book similar to this, but it did remind me of the synopsis of the book night bitch, where the protagonist believes she’s turning into a dog. as i haven’t read it i can’t comment on that book further, but those who enjoyed that novel may find more to love in this novella than i did. i think this concept and the various other ideas presented in the book would’ve been better served in a full length novel. a novella format of only 112 pages felt like barely scratching the surface. i think short horror has to be sharp and to the point, or hazy and trusting of the reader, and it felt like this novella flopped between the two at different points, which made the tone very different which pulled me out of the story.

overall i'm a bit sad about this one, but it's only confirmed my desire to read lee mandelo's previous work, and to keep an eye on their career going forward.

thank you to tor for providing me with a proof copy!

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A unique premise and well done about a woman using a technical interface to put herself in the mind of a wolf. It starts as a scientific experiment and takes over her life to the detriment of her marriage and other relationships. It's interesting speculation about the emotions of a wolf during pack time of cleaning, playing, sleeping, and hunting.

The secondary storyline is about the disintegration of her marriage to her wife and how the wolf relationship becomes more important than saving her marriage. Some brief f/f sex doesn't distract. A short, quick read that pulled me into the life of this woman and "her" wolf.

Thanks to #netgalley and #macmillan for the advance copy; opinions are my own.

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A character study about the hubris of believing you can cheat hubris.

I'm afraid the fashionable trend of referring to people as "bodies" is incorrigible by now. What began as a specific usage in Academese with a specific meaning has finally completed its migration into literary language, where it stands out from the text like a record scratch in a soundtrack. If you can summon the patience to put up with dozens of instances of this lexical affectation, you'll have a pleasant time reading Lee Mandelo's otherwise fascinating novella Feed Them Silence.

Set in a near future beset by ongoing environmental collapse, Feed Them Silence tells the story of Sean, a neuroscience researcher in a failing marriage, and a wolf called Kate, a member of the last surviving pack in the wild and Sean's object of study. As part of a last-resort attempt to make people actually care for endangered species, Sean et al. have developed a neural implant that transmits the sum of Kate's wolfy sensations and emotions into Sean's head. The hope of this ethical minefield of a study is that, by making an animal's inner experience publicly known, enough empathy will be sparked to mobilize stronger support for conservation programs. However, before Sean's investigation yields any publishable findings, it becomes clear that downloading a wolf's consciousness onto a human brain should come with a lengthy warning label. What this mental connection does to Sean and how her human connections change as a result of Kate's influence is the main focus of the story.

One recurring preoccupation in Feed Them Silence is the question of who is invading whom. From the inside of her fancy telepathic machine, Sean believes she's bored a peephole into the wolf's mind, but the process could be just as accurately described as the wolf's experiences supplanting Sean's. If you're going to pretend that scientific observation can be passive, you're going to have to deal with what "passive" entails: to know something is to let it change you. Is Sean still Sean while the content of her subjectivity is being replaced with that of another mind?

That question can be rephrased as: can Sean truly know what it's like to be a wolf? But then we'd be joining a discussion that started half a century ago and remains unresolved. Fortunately for the reader, Feed Them Silence isn't so much a story about the metaphysics of consciousness as one about the ethics of interaction. Sean et al. are well aware that Kate didn't, and couldn't, articulate an informed opinion about the prospect of having a chip put in her brain for someone to spy on her thoughts. This whole mission to engender empathy relies on an act of aggression. In trying to foster cooperation between humans and animals, Sean has had to commit the deepest breach of trust.

The book acknowledges this paradox with open eyes, as do researchers in the real world. Our natural communication barrier renders lab animals more vulnerable than human volunteers, and yet it is that same communication barrier which makes a laxer ethical standard necessary for animal experimentation to be doable at all. A mouse can't tell you whether it wants its belly cut open, but precisely because you can't ask it about its dinner, you have to cut its belly open.

In the case of Kate the wolf, the paradox is compounded by layers of dramatic irony. The neural implant was put in her without asking how she felt about it, but the direct communication that the implant provides makes it now possible to know exactly how she feels about it. But even with that level of access to Kate's mind, what good does it do? It's still mediated by a radio signal, and processed by Sean's human brain; and the people Sean wishes to convince of Kate's inherent worth will only know her wolfy feelings as expressed in human words. The book refers multiple times to the preverbal, intuitive, visceral quality of the data received by Sean's brain, but the reader can only learn about it from the words in the book. Feed Them Silence thus becomes an illustration of the paradox attributed to the sophist Gorgias: things can't be known, and even if they are somehow known, they can't be communicated—the paradox being that such a statement is itself the communication of something known. Literature is the art of going inside someone's head; to write a story about the impossibility of truly going inside someone's head is the ultimate form of dramatic irony.

So let's talk about a singing cat for a moment.

At the end of The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli the man-cub feels a sudden urge to abandon his wolf pack and return to human society. As a farewell ceremony, his animal friends sing a song of well-wishing. The panther's part includes these verses:

Feed them silence when they seek
help of thine to hurt the weak.

The reference to this line in the title of the novella does quite a bit of heavy lifting. As a human who can understand the speech of wolves, Mowgli is the ideal of empathy that Sean aspires to. And the panther can be read as Mowgli's mirror image: an animal who can understand humans. The farewell song is made of moral maxims intended to keep Mowgli in good terms with the natural world even after he's reintegrated into civilization. In this context, "to hurt the weak" alludes to the imbalance of power between humans and animals, and the request to "feed them silence" means to deny humans the use of the fruits of that imbalance of power.

In other words, Sean's method of research, conceived as a means to oppose the domination of nature, can easily become another form of domination. The findings of her study could be packaged and monetized as an entertainment gadget instead of a tool of political action. Empathy, the altruistic sharing of pain, can be twisted into a selfish extraction of pleasure. And here's where the novella reaches thematic completion: the point where the political meets the erotic.

Intersubjective attunement taken to the point of feeling exactly what the other is feeling is the Holy Grail of eroticism. Sean's link to Kate isn't blatantly described in those terms, but it's impossible to miss the intense desire that such intimate connection produces in Sean. In one scene, Sean's therapist directly compares her marital difficulties with the undemanding presence of an always available object of desire who can't refuse, can't reject, can't withhold, can't leave. But even through her deliberately unidirectional channel of communication, the power that Sean exerts over the wolf is complicated by the power that the wolf begins to exert over Sean. Just like with knowing, to desire something is to let it change you.

In a short wordcount, Feed Them Silence explores convoluted questions of epistemic justice and proposes a scenario where the standard intuitions fail to offer full solutions. Your mind may not know whose mind you're visiting while reading it, but one sure thing is that your mind will have been changed by the experience.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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I read Feed Them Silence in one breathless sitting! It may be a novella, but this small book packs a big punch and will be one I'm thinking about for a long time.

Imagine it's 2030 and grey wolves are nearly extinct. Sean just got a grant for a groundbreaking scientific experiment where she will connect via neural link to Kate, a wild wolf. Brain mesh implants in Sean & Kate will allow Sean to smell just what the wolf smells and make connections to how she interacts in her environment. Sean's hoping the results of this study will help the wolves and get more money to conserve the forests.
Sean's wife disagrees with the entire project and their relationship starts to fray and fracture.

Being brain-linked to a wolf isn't going exactly how Sean expected. She's feeling more connected to Kate and her pack than her wife and team and soon she's behaving erratically and her team starts to wonder if her brain chemistry is being altered...

🐺🔬

Feed Them Silence is beautifully written, but absolutely devasting! As an animal lover I found it very difficult to read at parts and even though I knew it couldn't end well I could not stop myself from turning pages!

My only real complaint is that I wish it was longer and there was more background into the science and Sean's marriage.

I'd recommend this one if you're looking for some quiet horror that will wreck you!

TW: animal testing, cheating

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1.5 stars

I was going into this thinking it was going to be a super weird sci-fi horror but instead I’m just left confused. I feel like this is in the sub-genre of quiet horror. It’s what isn’t said that makes it scary but that’s not what I expected or what I wanted from this.

In this book, Sean is going into the the subconscious of a wolf in a local pack as part of her grant experiment and as a result, her connection to the wolf is destroying her marriage to her wife. This story instead seems like it’s telling about the slow process of their marriage falling apart.

I really wanted more from this. I feel like I need to read something else from this author because I enjoyed the writing, I just feel like this wasn’t for me.

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I read Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo as soon as I could get a copy of it. I knew that I was going to like it and I did. What I liked most was Mandelo's writing style. "Feed Them Silence" is the new novella by Mandelo and while I loved the writing style I can't say that I enjoyed the story.

Let me break this down a bit. I had an interesting discussion with a colleague about the premise of being in side the mind of another species or even an alien life form. How can we ever do that? We can only explore the life of another being filtered through the bias of already being a human being. This book took me back to my university days when I was taking Philosophy. My old pal, Nagel and his "What it's like to be a bat" essay. The issue is that you can't understand the experience of "being" another creature unless you can become that creature absolutely.

Mandelo started off strong in this novella. I was intrigued by the potential science behind a neural link that would allow an animal and a human to sync in a way that would provide feedback. I found that I wanted more of the background and the futuristic explanation of the science. That is, however, my fault. I often read books without first seeing what genre they are.

Working within the confines of a novella, Mandelo quickly shifts to the horror side of the story. Here is the point at which my problems began. The main character Sean is a research scientist on the edge of a great discovery but their personal life is a bit of a wreck. From moment one, Sean is an unlikeable character. Solely focused on work, Sean's marriage is in tatters and she's really not even pleasant to her wife. I found the relationship moments to be quite bleak. What saved it for me is the style of Mandelo's writing. I'm not sure I can put my finger on it, but I adore Mandelo's use of words. The language is rich and syrupy and gives me something to savour. I remember thinking exactly the same thing when I was reading "Summer Sons".

As the marriage frays, Sean sinks herself completely into her research. She becomes abnormally attached to the wolf she is connected to. Perhaps she was looking for some sort of connection in her life, perhaps Mandelo had another meaning in mind and I missed it. I struggled a bit with the instant connection that Sean had to the wolf...and also the ethics of subjecting a wolf to an invasive surgery for research. SPOILER: and later... Sean was outraged when killing the wolf was put on the table which was hypocritical.

This is definitely a horror... but I think I was expecting more of he horror to come from the actual connection to the wolf than the fact that most of the human beings were absolutely horrendous people that I probably wouldn't want to know!

The writing is stellar...just not the book for me, I think. I would have loved a book that was about the science behind the connection between human and animal and I would have also loved a book about the train-wreck relationship... I think though, both these stories were left a bit unfinished for me.

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<i>Summer Sons</i> is one of my favourite books, so I was amped for something new from Lee Mandelo. This read was interesting but not something that super engaged me. The writing was still beautiful, so I think it was definitely more the subject matter that didn't work for me. Either way, I'll be checking out whatever this author writes next.

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Unfortunately, Feed Them Silence made me realize that Lee Mandelo is not the author for me. I thought his debut, Summer Sons, had a lot of potential, along with a lot of room for improvement. However, their sophomore book led me to feel that I’m just not the audience for his work. To start, this is definitely a book for people who have a particular interest in wolves, of which I am not. On top of that, I didn’t find there was much interest beyond the research storyline, as every interesting potentiality you’d expect the book might explore is quickly aborted before they can even begin. On top of that, the main character’s relationship problems were heard to care about when she clearly didn’t care about them herself. A storyline which also comes to a narratively unsatisfying ending, with her wife deciding to give her another chance on the basis of her having “learned something” from her experience with the wolves (what she is meant to have learned, and how it would make her more appreciative and proactive in her marriage, remains unclear to me). Overall, I certainly think this book will find its audience, just not with me. I would also still potentially be open to reading more from the author in the future, depending on the subject. Thank you to Tordotcom and Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

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TITLE: Feed Them Silence
AUTHOR: Lee Mandelo
112 pages, Tordotcom Publishing, ISBN 9781250824509 (hardcover; also, e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: In Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo’s penchant for characters searching for answers to questions that get to the heart of who they are combines with their felicity with sensory details that immerse the reader in the character’s head and world to create a work of lush, sometimes gut-punching, beauty that questions where the line is between ethical and abusive research practices involving animals who can’t give consent and ruminates on human and animals’ shared need to belong. Feed Them Silence is a moving and effective look at the ways in which we seek connection and how our obsessions lead as much to heartbreak as to breakthroughs. At 112 pages, it’s a fast read but not a forgettable one.

LONGER REVIEW: Lee Mandelo’s new release, Feed Them Silence, is in concept and execution about as far as one can get from their previous book Summer Sons: novella vs. novel, science fiction rather than supernatural horror, cold labs and winter forests in place of hot Southern gothic buildings and summer cemeteries. What the works share is lead characters determined to find answers to questions that get to the heart of who they are, and Mandelo’s felicity with sensory details that immerse the reader in the character’s head and world.
Doctor Sean Kell-Luddon’s lifelong love of wolves has led to her current research project: using a surgically inserted neurological interface to transmit the thoughts and emotions of one of the world’s last free-roaming wild wolves to Sean’s own brain. (At the same time, her research team collects the raw data of the transmission for possible future use by the folks funding the research project.) Mandelo does a wonderful job contrasting Sean’s inner life when connected to her wolf Kate, especially the sense of belonging and emotional connection, with her outer life, which is clearly fraying even before the novella begins (especially her marriage, but her relationship to her team as well). Sean is searching not only for an understanding of, and a way to help, her nearly-extinct favorite species but also for a deeper connection psychologically to replace the one she’s losing in the physical world.

Scientists often speak of the dangers of anthropomorphizing – assigning human thoughts and characteristics to – animals (wild or domesticated) whose brains do not function the way ours do. Sean’s rational intention to avoid it falters the longer and more often she is directly connected to Kate via the interface. Transcribing what she gleans into human terms and being unable to separate her personal life from her project sets up the final conflict of the book beautifully.

If I have one complaint about the book, it’s that the narrow Sean-centric POV, which gives us such amazing insight into Sean’s intentions, history, and altering mental state, does not allow us to get to know some of the other characters as well as I would have liked, in particular Sean’s wife, Riya. Riya does play an important role in the story, she’s not just a prop to hang Sean’s faults on, so I would like to have seen some of the events of the book from her perspective. That’s the joy and the sting of novellas, though. I an avowed fan of the format, but the tight focus that makes novellas so enjoyable sometimes leaves us wanting the deeper insight a longer work might provide. That being said, the supporting cast of Feed Them Silence is all well-drawn and distinct. The world-building surrounding Sean, Riya, the team, and Kate is perfectly evoked: with just a few sentences, we know we are in a near-future where climate change has wreaked havoc on wild animal populations as resources dwindle. Also, a world where corporate interests are willing to fund cutting-edge research projects that academia is hesitant to touch – drawing attention to how hard it is to delineate that line where ethical research turns abusive and teasing questions of intent versus execution when it comes to the uses to which the research results are put.

Through it all, Mandelo fills the book with lush, sometimes gut-punching, sensory details, especially but not only when Sean is connected to Kate. I became completely immersed in descriptions of the cold winter forest, the aches and pains of being undernourished, the smells of fellow pack members, the taste of blood and raw meat as the pack takes down a rare bit of prey. I felt like I was truly there. There’s also a very affecting scene between Sean and her Riya that trades on the same level of sensory detail.

Feed Them Silence is a moving and effective look at the ways in which we seek connection and how our obsessions lead as much to heartbreak as to breakthroughs. At 112 pages, it’s a fast read but not a forgettable one.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Feed Them Silence released on March 14, 2023.

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Lee Mandelo really has raised the bar for 2023 new releases. Though not the kind of frightening that will keep you checking the shadowy corners every time you enter a room, Mandelo’s dark, sci-fi novella Feed Them Silence nevertheless has an unsettling air of wrongness that pervades the story and leaves you wondering what choices you, the reader, would have made in Sean’s place, and if you would have acted any differently. I absolutely loved it!

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I... I really don't have many kind things to say about this book. The main character we were following was unlikable and selfish, her colleagues her bland and boring, her wife suffered the entire time, and the hypocrisy that dripped from the main character was so-- it was enraging. And sometimes, a character in a fictional novel learns their lesson too late, they have to deal with the repercussions of their actions and deal with the awkward confrontation that comes from but! There was none of that in this novella.

The year is 2031 and Sean, a woman in STEM, is heading up a research project to delve into the mind of one of the last wild grey wolves alive. Let me reiterate. <i>One of the last</i> wild wolves alive. So, knowing this, Sean goes ahead, does the invasive procedure while losing her marriage and her mind and any morality. It has terrible consequences, who saw that coming, and just... isn't enjoyable.

I think the part that really, really grinded my gears was the hypocrisy at the end <spoiler>"you can't kill Kate! She's an endangered wolf!!"</spoiler> holy shit why did you even do this then??? None of this made any sense to me, even in picking wolves outside of Sean's own selfishness. Sean was just stupid and a bunk scientist and, yes, I know greed exists in the sciences and people like her exist but I really don't want to read about them.

It was beautifully written but that's not enough to save a poor story with a not so great main character.

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Neuroscientist Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon has finally reached the pinnacle of her career—spearheading groundbreaking research that will open up the minds of nonhuman animals to humans. By surgically implanting one of her study wolves with a sensory transmitter and herself with its receiver, Sean can experience what the wolf, assigned the moniker Kate, is experiencing. Between lack of food, tainted water, and increasingly brutal winters, the last wild wolf pack is expected to die out within two winters and conservation seems like a pipe dream. Sean’s study will not only make her a scientific rockstar, but will also satiate her long-held hunger for the easy intimacy and closeness of a wolf pack.

While the fruits of Sean’s labor in neuroscience are being harvested, the fields of her marriage are becoming painfully, obviously fallow. Her ambition and self-centeredness have taken a toll on her partner, Riya, with this project becoming an exemple of everything Riya feels is wrong with their marriage and a battleground in their household. Despite the widening fractures, Sean pushes forward, confident it will all be worth it in the end. She’s also confident that her connection to Kate and being a subject-observer in her own study will not affect her ability to maintain scientific distance.

Yet, with Sean’s brain continually flooded with data and sensations from Kate, Sean cannot fully disconnect from being a silent observer and receptacle for Kate’s interiority. As her need to be one with Kate grows, boundaries become blurred. As the cold winter chill sets in, Sean’s future may be as bleak as that of the wolves.

Feed Them Silence is a compelling and engaging character study that explores our relationship to other animals, connection, partnership, and the often conflicting nature of emotional needs, desires, and personality. As the novella uses the science as a gateway into the exploration of Sean’s character and motivations, the sci-fi aspect of the story is very accessible and handled well. Set in the not too distant future, the technology used is comparable to current and developing technologies, and Mandelo does an excellent job making the tech feel believable and not distracting. Although the brain’s plasticity is what makes beings capable of learning, changing, and adapting, Sean entangling her brain with another creature’s and receiving sensory data the human mind is not formatted to properly receive and interpret is a dicey proposition, and as a neuroscientist, the fact that Sean is so confident that there will be no egregious consequences speaks volumes of her ego, hubris, and desperate longing.

Though Sean’s study is touted as a conservation effort, in reality it is driven by her extremely personal need. Nothing touches Sean’s core self, not even her partner of ten years, and all her life Sean has been drawn to (and envious of) the unreserved and easy closeness of wolves; even her burgeoning sexuality was tied to wolves, as stories about wolves and girls/woman are what attracted her attention. Now, as an adult whose life has been full of striving—striving to be a revered neuroscientist, striving to be the power couple other’s envy, striving for some kind of fulfilling connection but still feeling utterly empty and alone—she has the technology and resources to satisfy herself, while cementing her legacy as “the every(wo)man scientist hero.”

Sean is desperately hollow, consuming others for her needs and her purposes as temporarily fillers for that emptiness, and with her project she finally has access to the feelings and belonging she’s craved, that unguarded and easy companionship she had previously only been able to study from afar. While Sean craves connection, she abhors intimacy forged through emotional labor, and all her studies have been a pathway to access some form of effortless, primal care and bonding; she looks for something that she can have and take and gorge her senses in without work, complexity, or accountability. The only “unfettered intimacy” Sean has ever felt is for Kate, her unknowing avatar whose connection is only one way by design, while any crumbs of honesty and intimacy she gives Riya are with grudging reluctance and as fixes as thin and flimsy as paper mâché.

Feed Them Silence has lovely and well-crafted prose; it was easy for me to fall into Sean’s experiences and her mental link to Kate, and to understand her longing to be known, though only on her terms. The story touches on some gender, racial, and social issues, given Sean and Riya’s positions as academics and being in an interracial marriage, which could have been more fleshed out, but they are mostly passing notations since Sean, like with many things that require emotional engagement, shies away from them if they don’t affect her. While Sean is pretty self-involved and borders on unlikable (and I thought that Riya should just cut her loses), I enjoyed her journey and appreciated the realistic tone of the story Mandelo tells.

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I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is classified as science fiction, but you could easily plop it down on the literary fiction shelves in a bookstore and nobody would know the difference. Mandelo's writing is strong, and they craft a compelling narrative here. Sean is just a shit character, to be honest, and yet I was engaged through the entire story. Normally a character like this would have just annoyed me to the point that I would quit reading -- or not enjoy my reading experience, at least -- but that didn't happen here. I wanted to see how things would turn out, even though I suspected what would happen. There's a lot to discuss here, in such a small package, which will make this a great choice for book clubs.

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Passion is a complex thing to get a handle on, as it is difficult to separate from symbiotic notions of romance. But to show passion at its central, most primal part, is to describe it as a kind of obsession. Obsession and the dangers therein is what this book is about.
There are several overarching themes occurring with this novel at once. The most dramatic of which is the toxicity of parasocial relationships, and at which point that type of engagement becomes delusional. However, there is also a very fine thread of conservationist mimesis, in which someone detached from “green” philosophy chooses to empathise with an endangered animal in the most visceral way possible, literally made to feel their fear, starvation, and overarching sense of dread. Then there’s the one I bank on being the most impressive to hippie professors should anyone ever decide to cite Feed Them Silence in any sort of academic endeavour: The idea that nature in itself is a consumptive resource in the face of human progress. That humans as a species may wish to seek communion or understanding in nature, but in doing so may intentionally destroy it in order to achieve that. Seems a bit counter-productive, but that’s where that idea of obsession really comes in—feeding into the age old scientific dilemma of just because you can, should you?
I think Feed Them Silence draws on a lot of interesting psychological and philosophical strings; that when all pulled at once makes you think differently about how our species interacts with the world around it, and also how we sometimes grow too comfortable in our own skin. I am not saying it is a book that will change your life, but it is unlike anything I have ever read before, and that is more than enough for me. If you feel yourself up to the weight of its gravity, I would certainly recommend it.

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