Fantasy Book Critic: Book review: The Feeding by Anthony Ryan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anthony Ryan is the New York Times best selling author of the Raven's Shadow epic fantasy novels as well as the Slab City Blues science fiction series. He was born in Scotland in 1970 but spent much of his adult life living and working in London. After a long career in the British Civil Service he took up writing full time after the success of his first novel Blood Song, Book One of the Raven's Shadow trilogy. He has a degree in history, and his interests include art, science and the unending quest for the perfect pint of real ale. For news and general wittering about stuff he likes, check out Anthony's blog at: anthonyryan.net.

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing, Inc (August 12, 2025) Page count: 288 pages, Paperback

Anthony Ryan’s The Feeding is a competent, fast-moving post-apocalyptic thriller packed with familiar beats. It’s an entertaining read, briskly paced, competently written, and built around a protagonist who’s easy to root for. But it’s also derivative.

A new breed of vampires has decimated people after an event called The Feeding. The creatures are divided into three groups - the mindless gamma, the semi-sentient beta, and the dangerously intelligent alpha. The survivors, meanwhile, cling to life in walled redoubts, rationing food, ammunition, and medicine. Communities need the Crossers to survive -these hardened couriers risk the wilderness to trade and scavenge for what’s left of civilization.

Our protagonist, Layla, joins them to find medicine for her sick father figure. Expect danger, betrayal, and plenty of teeth. Ryan wastes little time getting to the point. The pacing is tight, and the prose is refreshingly lean. The Feeding reads like a movie script in the best sense. The action is crisp, the tension steady, and the worldbuilding sketched in with enough detail to feel tangible without dragging down the story. The vision of the Outside is bleak. We get ruined cities, gutted buildings, and shadows that might be watching.

Layla herself is easy to root for. She’s pragmatic, loyal, and often in over her head, which makes her struggles feel grounded. Her drive to save Strang makes her push through adversities and the chaos around her. gives the story an emotional throughline that holds up well against the chaos around her. She's also a part of the small, loyal band of survivors, and there's a lot of tension between trust and betrayal, good found family dynamics that works.

And that’s the book’s biggest weakness: everything in The Feeding feels familiar. Everything here has been done before, and often better. The walled settlement, the tough-but-kind hero, the grizzled mentor, the ominous Outside, it’s all paint-by-numbers apocalypse. Even the big twists feel like déjà vu, like Ryan’s checking boxes rather than breaking new ground. There’s nothing wrong with using tropes, but Ryan rarely subverts or deepens them; he simply executes them efficiently. The result is a story that’s solid but predictable.

The horror, too, plays it safe. The vampires are frightening in concept but don't bring much existential dread. They function mostly as set dressing for action scenes, and a backdrop for human. The final chapters hint at larger ideas (hierarchy among the creatures, possible sentience, and long-buried secrets), but these threads are underdeveloped, and the ending rushes toward a resolution.

Still, I had a good time listening to it. Ryan knows how to write a clean, readable story. His sense of pacing and tension keeps the pages turning, and even when the plot hits familiar beats, it does so with professional polish. It’s not hard to imagine this as a streaming-series adaptation. A few sharp jump scares, some good set design, and a charismatic lead could make The Feeding a great TV series.

In the end, The Feeding is satisfying, easy to digest, and unsurprising. It’s enjoyable in the moment, thanks to its speed and clarity. It does everything right but nothing new.