The Inferior

I met Peadar Ó Guilín at Worldcon last summer in Montreal. We were introduced in the participants’ green room by a mutual colleague, and when I asked Peadar what his novel was about, he gave me a sheepish grin and his lovely Irish accent twisted in that universal tone of voice that means this is complicated and you’re not going to believe it, but…

Young adult science fiction about cannibals, Peadar said. I laughed, and nodded, and I think I conceded that it sounded like an improbable combination while at the same time I admitted that I was intrigued to see how he had pulled it off.

It’s interesting making friends with writers whose work I’m unfamiliar with. Sometimes I can make great connections with people only to learn later that I can’t get into their writing, and that’s always a disappointment when it happens. But sometimes when I get to meet great people, my estimation for them only goes up when I discover the depth of their skill.

However, my schedule being what it is, sometimes it takes me a while to get there.

I spent Monday devouring (pun intended) The Inferior — the young adult science fiction cannibal novel, published by an imprint of Random House. Character-driven and soulful, it does for cannibals what JP Moore’s “Toothless” does for zombies. Really excellent, well-woven and poignant with spot-on pacing and delivery.

On a technical level, I was especially impressed by the seamless transitions in the gradual reveal. It’s no surprise when a writer crafts deliberately-misleading first impressions so that they can introduce the “real” situation later and turn the tables on the reader, but it’s a ploy that often sounds grand in theory and falls short in execution. Here, the story elements as I originally interpreted them felt natural and I accepted them easily. Yet, by the time I realized I’d been taking it in from the wrong perspective, the accumulation of the hints had been so well-paced that I wasn’t jarred. Instead, when I realized what I was meant to realize, I wondered how I could ever have interpreted those hints any other way. Writers, this is how it’s done.

The underlying themes about consumption and hypocrisy are bold enough to make you aware of your own behavior and beliefs, but not with the heavy-handed delivery that we’ve all grown to resent. Here, the message doesn’t overshadow the characters.

I strongly recommend picking it up. If you’re not sure whether it will be the right book for you, there are free sample chapters to help you make up your mind. It’s not sanitized and bloodless, but it’s also not gratuitously gory; where it shocks, it does so not to disgust us, but to make us think.

Tagged as: books, Peadar Ó Guilín, reviews