“Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the sleek, muscle-bound, eat-your-face-off variety.
Caede wakes on the pavement one cold morning surrounded by dead bodies, some look like they died in mid-transformation, others look like something has been eating them. She doesn’t quite remember how she got there or what the heck is going on.
So begins a story that borrows heavily from zombie genre stories like The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later (More the latter as EAT has a distinctly British flavor that it shares with the Danny Boyle film). Like those stories with which it shares some DNA, EAT is a tale of survivors finding each other, working together and sometimes losing each other again.
The only differences here are cosmetic. Replace zombies with humans mutated into animal hybrids and you’re halfway there. Some of the mutations aren’t so bad, others are absolute horror shows. Brown does a fine job of taking the reader into the dark and showing them monsters.
She also does a great job of developing real human characters that are all flawed and screwed up, but they each have a heart. A heroine shutdown with impenetrable boundaries, a hero with a drinking problem, a kid who might be a sociopath, a doctor who’s a coward. And then the author combines them into a found family that must fight through madness to survive.
The action scenes are frequent, the violence is visceral, and the monsters are man-eaters. Throw in a well-crafted romance thread and you’ve got a book that reads fast and fun. It’s not meant to be anything more important than a scary joy-ride but that it does very well.
I’m giving this book 4 out of five stars only because there’s room for improvement, but you should get this book if you like a good zombie survivor tale.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭑
EAT: ΣΔΤ Book One: Sigma
Jesse Brown
Publication Date: November 2, 2023
Publisher: Self Published
The cover
I like the cover art for EAT. The illustration appears to be hand-drawn and shows a good sense of form and contrast. The cover is dramatic and well laid out.