Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for an ARC of Feeders.

This was easily the weirdest book I've read all year and I LOVE weird, but this just didn't hit the mark. I was really hoping for a solid horror story but this ended up just being 90% gratuitous gore for shock value and 10% creepy details that actually benefited the storyline. Probably the scariest part of the book was how old AF reading from the viewpoint of a 19 year old social media obsessed teen made me feel 😅 I need to go wash my brain now.

2.5 stars rounded up

Reading FEEDERS is the figurative equivalent of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or of riding an out-of-control bullet train racing toward derailment! Unstoppable race toward destruction as we witness a young life falling apart and scrabbling desperately to hang on. The entirety of the novel I pondered whether events were actually occurring, whether there was some kind of outre input [mind control? Hypnotic manipulation? Supernatural interference? A government covert experiment--shades of FIRESTARTER?] Or was our unreliable, often unlikable, and only rarely eliciting-of-empathy, protagonist, actually experiencing psychic decompensation [breakdown of both the mind and the soul]? Author Matt Serafini does an efficient job of making both protagonist and reader truly fear "losing one's mind and grasp of (what-really-is?) reality."

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

This didn't land for me, the characters felt flat and repetitive, and while the premise needed certain lingo to work (influencer/online) it just didn't keep me invested.

This was different and not exactly what I was expecting. Kinda thought it was a metaphor for emotional vampires. Overall a fun read.