Tread Carefully: Announcing The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed tantalizes with evocative ideas, excellent characterization, and beautiful language. It is a perfect story to tell in novella form, a snippet of a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has been defeated too many times to make sense of its struggle. Mohamed alternates the book’s narration between tense, hopeless diary entries and commentary by an anthropologist who has discovered the diary in question decades later. This isn’t a plot-driven tale; rather, it’s thematically rich, with layered backstory and worldbuilding which rewards a second read.
The two narrators are Emerson, the anthropologist, and Eva, the diarist. Emerson lives in a comfortable world not too different from our own (phones, computers, and other technology are mentioned), part of a team of scientists visiting a “siege city” on a research trip. Eva lives in a nightmarish combat zone, scavenging supplies from the destroyed city and eating human flesh to surviv