From James DeMonaco, the writer/director of The Purge film franchise, comes the provocative and terrifying last stand of a lone outpost of women in the wake of a deadly pandemic.

Allie Hilts was still in high school when a fire at a top-secret research facility released an air-borne pathogen that quickly spread to every male on the planet, killing most. Allie witnessed every man she ever knew be consumed by fearsome symptoms: scorching fevers and internal bleeding, madness and uncontrollable violence. The world crumbled around her. No man was spared, and the few survivors were irrevocably changed. They became disturbingly strong, aggressive, and ferocious. Feral.

Three years later, Allie has joined a group of hardened survivors in an isolated, walled-in encampment. Outside the guarded walls the ferals roam free, and hunt. Allie has been noticing troubling patterns in the ferals’ movements, and a disturbing number of new faces in the wild. Something catastrophic is brewing on the horizon, and time is running out. The ferals are coming, and there is no stopping them. – Goodreads.com

I’m a fan of The Purge movies, so when I saw the writer/director had written a book, I was immediately intrigued.

The first part of this book is fantastic – the reader sees through Allie’s eyes how this apocalyptic event begins and the hard choices she makes in order to survive.  Flash forward three years, and Allie has transformed from a talented lacrosse player worried about boys to a hardened feral killer with trust issues.  Obviously, living through something like this will change a person, but I would have appreciated the inclusion of some events that caused this alteration.  The three year interval is a blank slate and the reader sees what Allie is like mostly through internal monologues and observations of other characters.

Which brings me to this – Feral alternates between first person and third person, some of this with the same character, and different POVs from several characters.  Different POVs aren’t really a problem for me, but the shifts between first and third person are somewhat jarring.

Overall, this is a solid read – it doesn’t bring anything new to the table with this genre, but it’s fast-paced with some exciting action sequences and a pretty quick read.  The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel.

Feral is scheduled for publication April 4th, 2017.  Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital ARC.