Review of "Feed them Silence" by Lee Mandelo

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.