Simply put, Mandelo’s books are For Me. They’re eerie, intense, and full of queer people being messy as hell while untangling the snares of socialized masculinity.
There is so, so much I loved about this unique sci-fi novella. FEED THEM SILENCE is essentially a character study of Sean, whose desperate yearning for intimacy and close companionship is both the impetus for her latest research project and the cause of the breakdown of her marriage. One of my favorite things about this book is how well Mandelo ties those two things together (the research and the marriage) and in how many ways. Not the least of which is the tension between Sean and her wife, Riya, an ethnographer who vehemently opposes Sean’s project.
Even more so, however, I enjoyed probing the toxic, complicated nuances of Sean’s need for intimacy contrasted with her emotional distance. Notably, Sean’s relationships - namely those with Kate (the wolf) and Riya - are consumptive in nature and largely one-sided. She’s either unable or unwilling to emotionally connect with her wife; she blames Riya for their crumbling marriage (“maybe if Riya had been at home…”) but doesn’t put in the effort to rebuild what they’ve lost in their relationship (“Surely, scrubbing the baseboards and cooking the meals had shown some investment.”).
But though Sean is destructive and deeply flawed, she isn’t a villain. Achieving objectivity (let’s not talk about whether such a thing can truly be achieved) requires that Sean extract her own feelings and personality from the project. And as a masc-presenting person, she’s already been socialized into this stoicism, this emotional distance, which is exacerbated by the circumstances of the story. At one point, she wishes that she could slip into Riya’s brain to rifle through her emotions, because that’s an easier way to obtain the unfettered intimacy she so craves. Instead, she flings herself at Kate, whose brain she *can* slip into. At first, she assumes that she can do so without giving anything of herself in return - an arrogant belief, she notes - but she eventually gets so deeply immersed in what she feels with/for Kate (a parasocial relationship, for sure) that she defies protocol to tend to an injured pack member, trusting that these wild animals will recognize her as a companion.
FEED THEM SILENCE is also a meditation on the dangers of (public and ostensibly progressive institutions) accepting private-sector funding and of late capitalism determining the worth of a life (here, Kate’s).
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