★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed

Mira Grant

**Spoilers for Feed follow **

(Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout, but I will protect those in spoiler tags.

Fed is an alternative ending for Feed. It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella.

When I reviewed Feed, I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel.

I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing arbitrary rules that artists proceed to flout, stated that it was not allowed to kill off the first-person narrator at the end of a novel, because then how could the the story ever be told? (As XKCD has noted, some people struggle with the concept of "Fiction".) As it turns out, McGuire has an answer for that objection. At the end of Deadline, Zombie Georgia is resurrected with memories intact, so there is indeed a narrator capable of telling the story of Feed.

McGuire introduces Fed with these words:

This is another way the end of Feed could have gone: it picks up with the events of what would originally have been chapter twenty-five. It is not what happened.
But it could have.
We came very close.

which almost gives the impression that McGuire herself doesn't quite get the concept of fiction (or truth). "Very close" here means a few inches change in the positions of Shaun and Georgia at a crucial time. As McGuire's introduction suggests, it makes a huge difference in outcomes. And that is all I can say!

Goodreads review

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