Book Review: The Feed by Nick Clark Windo - More2Read
 

The Feed by Nick Clark Windo

 

  

THE FEED by Nick Clark Windo is a startling and timely debut which presents a world as unique and vividly imagined as STATION ELEVEN and THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS.

Tom and Kate’s daughter turns six tomorrow, and they have to tell her about sleep.
If you sleep unwatched, you could be Taken. If you are Taken, then watching won’t save you.
Nothing saves you.

Your knowledge. Your memories. Your dreams.
If all you are is on the Feed, what will you become when the Feed goes down?

For Tom and Kate, in the six years since the world collapsed, every day has been a fight for survival. And when their daughter, Bea, goes missing, they will question whether they can even trust each other anymore.

The threat is closer than they realise..

Praise:

The Feed is a chilling, dystopian page-turner – I was hooked from the very beginning and haunted for days after finishing it. (S J Watson)

[A] brilliant, highly charged debut (Daily Mail)

Combining thriller with futuristic nightmare, Nick Clark Windo’s debut novel presents an all too believable version of a near future . . . ambitious and thought-provoking (S magazine)

Easily one of the most powerful and disturbing novels of the year . . . intensely original and constantly surprising . . . a visceral experience (Starburst)

[An] admirable debut . . . succeeds as a sober, semi-satirical commentary on our connectivity-obsessed times (Financial Times)

I really enjoyed it and what a great ending! (Martina Cole)

A really clever and original book. A tense thriller wrapped up in a scarily plausible dystopian nightmare, with a twist that will make your head explode!   (C. J. Tudor)

Review:

The Feed does not create any physical sensation, its an implant, bio-tech with no battery source, the human is the power source.
And then…
A collapse
all feeds stopped
devastation upon the earth
people scattered
some survivors and some taken
the characters within this tale on the road in search for food and ways to bring back vegetation and then in search for the ones taken.
This barren devastation upon earth has the reader immersed within the story in a world with all that comes with survival and moving forward the story visceral, panoramic, and pastoral with clear telling before the reader.
This would appeal to readers who have liked Swan Song by Robert McCammon, The Stand by Stephen King, and The Road by Cormac Mccarthy. This has some good story, nice clear prose may not be as big as opus as some other great tales with similar subject matter but just as captivating, a modest tale in world gone topsy turvy, moral lines crossed and abuses upon the earth reaped upon the denizens of earth, an encompassing narrative that captivates the reader with the fates of a few souls and the earth as a whole in the need of finding things, truths, lost, and the taken.

Excerpts:

“…and for a long time we didn’t realise it was happening. So many people were taken, and there was no way of knowing. Because everyone looked the same, right? But these normal-looking people suddenly started doing bad things. Very bad things. Killing other people. Destroying buildings, power stations, trying to disrupt the airports. They killed the president. We didn’t know who was themselves and who was someone else. It was…terrible. They did awful things they’d never otherwise have done. But we realised people were being taken over in their sleep. So it became law: never to sleep alone, never to sleep unwatched. And..there were signs we had to look for. It stopped being a law that you couldn’t…Basically, Bea, if you saw someone being taken, it wasn’t against the law to…”

“At ground level, they enter streets where disorder rules: the devastation is random, it seems. Sometimes single houses are gutted while their neighbours are pristine. Walls have crumpled into the road and entire blocks have been razed. Scraps of building point up like blackened broken teeth. One mound of rubble is mixed with twisted metal. A plane? A Satellite? Something hurled down from the sky. Everywhere the trees are unruly, their branches grown too low, too wide, freed and controlled no more. Grass sprays up between the paving slabs. Down here on the ground, away from the super-loads, everywhere Tom looks lie bones. Some still snag tendrils of fabric, or maybe it’s matter, but most are sun-stripped clean. Sometimes there are recognisable configurations: two attaching at a knee; a ribcage like a spider; vertebrae with the jawbone attached. Pieces of people discarded like toys.”

 

 

 




Reviewed by Lou Pendergrast on 26 January 2018