Feed Them Silence is a short but tightly narrated work that gives an eerie and disturbing look at the line between ethics and academic hubris. Mandelo is a master of interiority, and this is on full display in the character of Sean, an ambitious scientist who wants nothing more than connection; not with the people around her, but with her research subjects: wolves.

After their debut, Summer Sons, I knew Mandelo would be an all time favorite writer of mine, and I was very happy to see that feeling cemented with Feed Them Silence.

Really enjoyed this bleak and complex novella from an author that I am pleased to be reading from again! As someone with a background in ecology, the plot of this novella fascinated me, and I really engaged with the ethical conflicts within the book, especially when it came to private sector funding.

Haunting speculation on the future of animals in the near-wild and our own place among them. Mandela introduces us to a researcher desperate for connection and a gray wolf eking out an existence in the perishing wilderness. Both subjects are facing extinction, but can their shared experience bring them anything but pain?

I was absolutely gutted by the poignant, but perhaps misguided, connection between researcher and subject here. The prospect of doing more harm than good delivered a palpable dread as the observer. Great questions asked and deceptive answers given.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my free copy. These opinions are my own.

Thank you to Tordotcom, the author, and NetGalley for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review. This book will be released on March 14, 2023.

*What else was she, really, but another animal body afraid of being alone in the cold?*

To satisfy both her personal and scientific curiosity, Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon is pursuing perhaps her most engrossing research project yet: tech that will enable her to experience the mind of a wild wolf, and all the sensations and harrowing experiences that come with it. But even as Sean becomes obsessed with connecting to “her wolf” and—in particular—feeling her connection to the pack, the experiment begins to affect her mind and her objectivity deteriorates, further fracturing her already-fraying relationship with her wife.

I would have picked up this novella no matter what, since Lee Mandelo is an auto-read for me, but combined with this extraordinarily compelling premise? Oof, there was no turning back. Because who amongst us as not wished to be connected to the consciousness of a wolf and experience wildness without human hang-ups getting in the way?

This story is all about connection, in fact. And the lack of it. Reading it definitely made me want to examine and maintain the emotional connections I have, because the second major plot thread here is about a decaying marriage and the dangers of the routine of convenience that can spring up when you’re too swept up in your work to notice that you’re leaving your partner out of your life. Sean’s scenes with her therapist were excruciating to read, and every conversation where Riya and Sean argued, fought, or otherwise had some kind of conflict literally gave me chest pains because it was so achingly real.

All of Sean’s encounters with the wolves—both through the neural interface and those that occur later, in person—are so well-written and feel more true to wolf behavior than I expected; even the scenes that are filtered through Kate’s brain to Sean’s and then to text for us to read feel like a realistic way of depicting those thoughts and sensory experiences in a wolfish way that humans can still process. I loved that Sean’s time with the wolf pack seemed to enable her to almost… become human and feeling and communicative again. I was also fascinated by the implied effects on both her and Kate; I really would have enjoyed to see more of the tech and science part of that, had the page count permitted.

Lee Mandelo, you’ve done it again, and this time left me with so many thoughts about the ethics of neurological entanglement, questions about where Sean goes from here, and a wolf-shaped hole in my mind.

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.

I don't usually tend to read horror, but I've been leaning more in that direction recently so I decided to give this novella a try. The theme of understanding other minds is one that appeals to me in a variety of contexts, and it was interesting to read a new genre's take on it. For a horror novice like me, this book stayed on the right side of the "overwhelmingly spooky" line while raising genuinely unsettling questions about research ethics and the impossibility of truly sharing another being's consciousness. Mandelo deftly balances two main storylines--in one, Sean tests an experimental neural mesh that allows her to experience life as the grey wolf Kate, while in the other her marriage to Riya slowly implodes as the work becomes ever more consuming. While Sean pours herself into trying to forge a true connection with Kate at work, she is largely oblivious to the difficulty of being-in-kind with even another human, a blindness that Riya repeatedly calls out. As Sean becomes more and more eager to share Kate's intimate and non-human experiences, she also loses touch with the people in her life and grows less able to appreciate their distinct minds. Using the science-fictional aspect of sharing a wolf's mind to highlight the challenges of sharing a human's worked well for me and gave depth and insight into the ordinary struggles of maintaining a marriage. At times, the novella felt (in a good way) like an intensely psychological domestic drama, circling around the problem of other minds in a viscerally personal sense rather than an abstract and philosophical one. After reading a number of books in which the protagonist literally shares their mind with another, being on the other side of the divide and seeing the gaps that cannot be bridged, by any amount of intimacy, was a disquieting but satisfying change of perspective.

As an academic myself, I sometimes found myself frustrated by how the story appeared to put the reader squarely on Riya's side, not only in terms of Sean's nonexistent work-life balance, but also on some of the thorny questions of experimental work with living subjects. It is certainly fair to call into question the ability of privately-funded labs to make an impartial assessment of the ethical implications of their work, or to suggest that informed consent is often affected by a power differential between researcher and research subject. However, I felt at times that Sean and her team's blindness to the consequences of their work was overstated, and that by commingling the consciousness-sharing aspect of the work with this ignorance of consequences for research subjects, the novella left little room to suggest what a more acceptable approach to science would look like. Despite this disagreement, Mandelo's prose on these themes is sharp and unsettling, and they do not shy away from exposing Riya's flaws even as Riya is set up to be "in the right" when pointing out Sean's. A book I can disagree with while still appreciating is always welcome, and being able to latch on to this personal intersection and push back helped ground the story in a world I have (perhaps too much) personally experienced.

Four out of five stars. A short but intense story that left me unsettled, in a (mostly) good way.

A dark sci-fi (lite) novella about melding your mind with a wolf's? Yes, sign me up I definitely wanted to read this. Then we tie in the ethics and overall mindfuckery of it all? YES PLEASE.

Lee Mandelo is wonderfully skilled at writing stories with this dark, surreal atmosphere that makes you FEEL and I'd say that is what bridges this novella to their previous novel, Summer Sons (which I loved!) Throughout this short read, I constantly felt unease. And that unease took so many different forms as it grew throughout the book: unease for the research, for the ethics of it, for this potential "use in VR entertainment" to unease for the impact it had on Sean and her perceptions, for the wolf and her pack. It was like that tingle in the back of your mind waiting for the other shoe to drop. The other pervasive feeling throughout this book is of yearning and desire for intimacy. Alongside the research study, we see Sean and her wife's deteriorating marriage that Sean is grasping for but also allowing to slip through her fingers. Pairing that alongside this story of Sean experiencing the wolf pack's intimacy through her wolf's emotions. Whoa. That was incredibly well thought out and executed to not only drive Sean's motivations but impactful for the reader.

I was very happy with this one. It was short, sweet and still packed a punch!

La premisa de esta novela corta de Lee Mandelo me parecía muy atractiva, el uso de una interfaz neuronal para que la investigadora protagonista de la novela pudiera compartir las experiencias de uno de los últimos lobos salvajes, en un entorno de cambio climático y desaparición de las especies. Un contexto similar al que ya vimos por ejemplo en No hay lobos en Tesakowa, pero en un futuro mucho más cercano y con bastante menos espacio para el desarrollo.


La novela tiene dos partes diferenciadas, teniendo cierta relevancia el espacio de estudio y las consecuencias de esta unión neuronal unilateral en la investigadora, que influye en la otra parte de la historia, en la que vemos reflejada su vida doméstica. Es muy llamativo que Sean busque ese sentimiento de pertenencia al grupo en su trabajo y en los lobos, cuando no es capaz de encontrarlo en su vida diaria. Las tensiones constantes con su pareja son un reflejo muy cotidiano de algo que puede suceder con demasiada facilidad cuando dos personas buscan progresar en sus carreras profesionales sin estar dispuestos a hacer concesiones para conciliar su día a día.

La novela es bastante corta y no llega a explorar en profundidad todos estos temas que me parecerían tan interesantes, además de que llega a una conclusión un tanto precipitada a mi entender. Hubiera preferido que Mandelo se explayara más sobre la investigación neuronal pero en las escasas cuatro horas que dura la narración del audiolibro resultaba muy difícil concentrar más información de la que ya se da sin caer en la sobrecarga de datos.

También me ha interesado mucho la crítica hacia el financiamiento de los estudios científicos, que al depender de capital externo y privado, queda a la merced de los caprichos del capitalismo o del mecenas de turno. No parecen importantes las consecuencias del estudio mientras se puedan obtener réditos económicos.

Creo que buscaré más obras de Lee Mandelo para ver qué tiene que ofrecer.

Lee Mandelo’s Feed Them Silence is a sci-fi novella with a dash of eeriness and horror. I was intrigued by the premise of a near-future in which scientists have the ability to neurologically link with wolves. The main character, Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon, is the leading neuroscientist of the groundbreaking experiment. She becomes part of the experiment when she links to the test-subject wolf named Kate. Desperate to find connection and camaraderie, she enters a virtual experience where she feels Kate’s pain, hunger, and fear.

Overall, I enjoyed how this story focused on the character journey of Sean. She’s a morally gray character with the relatable desire to connect with others. But as she becomes obsessed with her “connection” to Kate, her human relationships with colleagues and her wife, Priya, are at risk. Lee Mandelo creates a main character that can be interpreted by readers in many ways. My interpretation was this: sometimes, we can be so focused on a goal or dream, that we are detached from those around us and we forget to appreciate what we already have.

Feed Them Silence brings up a lot of questions regarding experiments. For example, it made me ponder 1) the emotional/physical risks and the ethical concerns of testing on living beings and 2) the pressure to produce results in order to satisfy funders. The most interesting aspect was Sean’s struggle to translate the feelings she perceived in the virtual experience into scientific data. Overall, I appreciated that Lee Mandelo did not try to offer solutions to these complex situations. This ambiguity gives the story the ability to cultivate conversations amongst readers about experiments and technology in our world.

After a quick Internet search, I was blown away to learn that Feed Them Silence is similar to current events. Neuralink, an Elon Musk company, has designed a chip that can be inserted in someone’s head with the goal of their thoughts controlling a computer’s functions. My initial reaction is excitement; this could potentially help people with disabilities use technology with more ease. However, Neuralink is facing controversy around its animal testing and the amount of animals who’ve died. Knowing that a company like this currently exists makes me certain that Feed Them Silence is a timely read.

If you are interested in character-driven stories that ponder advancements of technology, this is the story for you! Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and Tordotcom for an e-galley. I’m looking forward to reading future stories by Lee Mandelo.

This was very well plotted and tense, with really interesting commentary on climate crisis! The main character was just so repulsive in every way, well done on Mandelo for drawing her so sharply. I found the ending a bit anticlimactic/disappointing, but otherwise a great novella.

Lee Mandelo has been on my radar since I read SUMMER SONS back in 2021. When I saw that they had a new novella coming out, I requested it and here we are. FEED THEM SILENCE is about as far away from SUMMER SONS that you can get, while still being engaging and unique.

Have you ever looked at your dog or cat and wished you knew what they were thinking? Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon has, except not with a pet, but with a wolf. Finally technology that she and her team have developed is ready to be put to use. With this tech, Dr. Sean will be connecting her brain directly to that of a wild wolf. She will be virtually inside the head of a wolf, with all that that entails. Is the wolf cold? Dr. Sean will feel cold. Is the wolf starving? Dr. Sean will feel that hunger. Attacked by a bear? I guess you can figure out yourself how it goes from there. Will Dr. Sean be heralded as a scientific leader in this new tech field? Will she be able to translate wholly the information fed into her brain from the wolf's? Will she survive? You'll have to read this to find out!

This was such a creative piece of science/dark fiction! Who hasn't thought about such a thing from time to time, especially with our pets? This novella also brings up issues with ethics like... is such a thing the right thing to do? Will Dr. Sean be able to keep her personal feelings separate from those of the wolf's? Questions like: private funding vs. public funding, how that technology will be used in the future, these are all here. As such, this story really made me think.

For me, tales that make me think while also providing entertainment, are among my favorites. Tales that question technology and how it is used or misused often fascinate me, and this one was no different. Combine all that with Lee Mandelo's writing style and you have a winner!

Highly recommended!

*Thanks to NetGalley, Tordotcom and the author for the e-ARC in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it!*

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC, in exchange for an honest review!

I am definitely in the minority when I say this, but I was not a fan of this novella. I felt that Sean and Rita were so unlikeable that I just stopped caring about them all together by the time I reached the end of the book. Their marriage was not something I enjoyed because it was confusing, frustrating, and didn’t make any sense. I liked the team members more than anything else. The pacing of the story was a bit off for me: the main part of it seemed to drag on and the ending was too abrupt. I also would not consider this to be horror in any way, as some of the tags suggest. The premise of the story was unique and interesting, but I was left feeling unsatisfied overall.

This is a definite improvement upon the scattered disorganization of Summer Sons, though it lacked the visceral imagery that peppered that book (frequently enough that I kept reading even though I wasn’t particularly enjoying it). FEED THEM SILENCE brings up a lot of important topics in passing: commercialization/privatization of scientific discovery, conservation as a fad rather than a directive, empathetic distance (ie how close something/someone has to be to trigger empathy), interracial/intercultural marriage, and more. But we spent so much time in Sean’s head that it felt like we kind of missed the mark on all of them.

The ending of the story also snuck up on me. When Natalie Naudus started reading the ending audiobook credits, I was totally caught off guard. My immediate response was “wait, that’s it?”

Okay, this novella is weird but it unexpectedly really worked for me. It's a horror novella but at its core I think it's about how many of us seek connection and depth of feeling by immersing ourselves in a virtual world in hopes of finding a sense of purpose and freedom from existential loneliness. All the while, neglecting the relationships we already have and compounding the problem. Feed Them Silence imagines a move toward a more extreme version of this while things go terribly wrong.

In the near future Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon and her wife are middle-aged lesbians with marriage problems. But even as that relationship erodes, Sean throws herself into her research studying neurological connections between humans and animals as a way to create empathy. Sean is herself the test subject, being neurologically connected via surgery to a wolf. While the study is supposed to be clinical, Sean finds herself reacting physically and emotionally to the experience of sessions being bonded with this wolf as she interacts with her pack. Finding comfort and connection that she struggles with in real life.

I really connected with this novella and the horror felt horrific to me. Is it because I have experience sustaining a relationship for well over a decade? Very probably. While the wolf stuff is weird, this touches on very real struggles that are common to long term couples. Taking someone for granted, not communicating, workaholic tendencies, getting too comfortable, losing yourself in media, neglecting to show care, or even (as in this novella with a cross-cultural relationship) failing to recognize where you've fallen into harmful patterns with racial or gendered ramifications. All of these are things you have to actively work to combat in a successful long-term relationship and this very effectively navigates the horror and trauma of a relationship falling apart. And of course creepy brain patterns from being connected to a wolf.

While I suspect this will be a miss for a cross-section of readers it was definitely a hit for me. And I think there's something about Mandelo's writing that just works for my brain. And fantastic audio narration! I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

I was very, very hesitant to start this book because I have an aversion to any kind of harm to animals. I am (mostly) glad that I decided to read it anyway. Content warnings are listed at the bottom for those interested in the outcome.

Don’t get me wrong, it was rough. As a scientist myself, it’s always hard to deal with animal testing; you get attached very quickly, you care too much, and you feel tremendous guilt. I think, even though the entire story had me on edge, that gave me more of an emotional attachment to this novella.

It is the near future, and Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon is a scientist currently studying behavior in wolves. She has the chance to use a special interface to become “in-kind” with her wolf, Kate. This means that Sean can see, hear, smell, and fear whatever Kate does. The experiment is to determine why these wolves have survived when many other packs have died off.

There are a lot of ethical questions in this novella, and I think that adds to the general uneasiness to the read. It is only 100 or so pages, yet I took my time reading it, because I had so many thoughts I just had to write down.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for the chance to read this advanced review copy.

CW for medical setting, animal cruelty, animal death, blood, gore, racism, sexism, vomit, and infidelity

I appreciated the strange uniqueness of the premise of Feed Them Silence, but the execution was lacking something.

I was so eager and excited to read the next work from Lee Mandelo. The writing is so enticing, truly pulling the reader in. Our protagonist, Sean is dealing with her crumbling marriage and her important work at the same time, though the state of her marriage is in direct result of her being married to her work.

Sean is connected to a wolf pack through this incredible technology that connects her mind to one wolf in the pack. She is able to see and feel and experience life through this one wolf’s eyes. There is a stronger than strong pull Sean feels through this connection and I enjoyed it.

There was something missing though, in this book. Something missing that kept me from really and truly enjoying myself as I hoped I would.

2.5/5 stars

What I liked:

-Messy sapphics. I don't know I'm trying to be nice, but I do enjoy mess at least.

What I disliked:

-The Pacing. Oh my god the pacing was so slow and for no reason in my opinion. Like Sean was doing some unhinged stuff and then the book just ends. I felt like I was missing something.

-The side characters. The side characters in the lab were bland. I could not tell them apart and I do not even remember their names. This would not matter if they were not involved that much in the story, but they were. This made it difficult to read any dialogue involving them and Sean

-The marriage. I did not like how at the end RIya and Sean's problems are simply fixed. It seemed like everything worked out so easily. I can't say much without spoiling though.

-Language. I dislike how a lot of problematic language is unaddressed. There are moments where Riya describes Sean's behavior as being "man-like" and since this is unaddressed this implies that Sean's problem is that she acts like a man. Sean is not even sexist, she is just a terrible wife. Riya's bad characteristics are not compared to manhood because she is more feminine than Sean. Readers can then interpret this aspect of the book to mean that masculine-presenting people are more likely to be sexist and this is not true

The general message. I already disagree with the experiment because like Riya I do not think you need to put an implant in your head to understand why endangered species matter, so I already did not feel much sympathy for Sean. At the end of the book, the author implies that the experiment is bad because it made Sean a bad wife. I do not think that is why the experiment is bad and that is a very shallow message.

I would not recommend this book. I had high standards for this because "Summer Sons" is one of my favourite novels. Anyway I am just sad that I disliked this book and I expected more from the author.

So I would not recommend th

This was really unique. The neuro link to a wild animal has the outcome you think it would but the journey is heartbreaking yet so familiar. This def raises a lot of questions but doesn't really answer any of them; in some cases that makes for an interesting read and in other cases, I needed the answers to feel more connected to the plot. I think the underlying larger conversation is an ethical one regarding human science/experimentation on animals. Regarding this particular plot, you understand both sides of the story but the experimentation gets a little fuzzy and lost as she becomes more involved with the wolf. Maybe that's the point but at the same time I was asking, what did you expect what would happen?!

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Mesmerizing, thoughtful, and sometimes brutal, Feed Them Silence is a short novella packed with resonance.

This is a sci-fi in the barest sense of the word, as the only sci-fi thing about it is the futuristic technology. Everything else in the novel could take place in the world today.

The main character, Sean, is so interesting because she’s quite unlikeable but in a way that feels like a real person. Sean and her wife are drifting apart. As such, Sean throws herself into her work (her work also being a reason why they were drifting apart), and finds the connection she’s missing with her wife in this wolf. In a way, Sean’s connection to the wolf is exactly how her wife is feeling. The connection is one direction (the wolf doesn’t tap into Sean’s mind - it’s like a one-way mirror), and this is how Riya is feeling towards Sean - that her attempts at connection are one-sided. And Sean doesn’t know how to fix this disconnect she’s created, but she’s also not entirely motivated. She’s selfish and complacent in their relationship, something I think anyone who's been in a long-term relationship has experienced to some extent. This aspect was raw and so relatable. The story is so intricate and well-developed and layered, with the connection to the animal not only being a metaphor for Sean and Riya’s relationship but a comment on how a connection to nature can also help us build connections with other people. It’s beautifully done.

The novella also deals with the topic of ethics in research in animal testing, in how the need for funding sometimes convinces people to do things they aren’t entirely comfortable with and to make justifications for it. While I’m not in that space at all, it was easy to comprehend and understand Sean and her team’s difficulties.

As usual with anything with queer characters, I appreciated the normalized diversity. The main character is lesbian, and while the cast of supporting characters is small, they are diverse in background. I loved the women in STEM aspect as well, but also in how the higher-ups - those funding the projects - are all white dudes (as is the case today with most corporations and even universities). It was a bit of jab at the still-intact glass ceiling.

The language is concise and clear but carries a despondent, almost melancholy tone. The novella feels like winter, but not like snow on Christmas but November rain kind of winter. Like walking on a frozen cold beach, alone.

Overall, if you couldn’t tell, I thought this book was fantastic.

And given the main character in Mandelo's other book, Summer Sons, has the propensity to litter, the environmental aspect of this novella was much appreciated!

Feed them silence, by Lee Mandelo, could be an interesting movie, which relies more on images to get the narrative to the viewer, but, as a book, it supports itself so much on descriptiveness that it makes the story extremely unreadable.

Ahoy there me mateys!  I have always loved wolves so the idea of getting the inside perspective of a pack was appealing.  In this novella, Sean links her mind using a neurological interface with a female wolf in the name of scientific research.  I found the technology aspect of this book to be intriguing even if the consequences were alarming.  However, this wasn't the strong science oriented book that I wanted.

What the novella focused on was the toxic and failing relationship between Sean and her wife.  Sean is set up to be a selfish person who is only focused on her research.  However, I didn't really sympathize with her wife, Riya, either.  Riya also makes bad choices.  In fact, the moral of this story might be that all people are selfish, want connection with no real effort, and ultimately make decisions based on pure emotion even when they believe they are logical.

This is not a happy story.  The people are miserable.  The wolves are miserable.  The world is miserable.  Greed is the leading motivation.  The near future does not look very pleasant or appealing.  And I kinda despised the ending.

That said for being such a stark and sad look at humanity, I did feel it was well written.  The people and situations felt realistic.  The ethical considerations are touched upon.  I can't say I liked this very much (despite the wolves) but I would read something else by the author.  Arrrr!