Feral

by Berton Roueché

Amy and Jack Bishop find the tranquility of their new country home shattered by a pack of wild cats

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Cats, Animals, Suspense

137 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1974

About the author

Berton Roueché was a medical writer who wrote for The New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years. He also wrote twenty books, including Eleven Blue Men (1954), The Incurable Wound (1958), Feral (1974), and The Medical Detectives (1980). An article he wrote for The New Yorker was made into the 1956 film Bigger Than Life, and many of the medical mysteries on the television show House were inspired by Roueché's writings.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

spooktober marches on with a spooky caturday read and a 2-part review! GO HERE!

this is the THIRD cat-horror book i have read from grady hendrix’s treasure trove of pulp horror, Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction. in both Panther! and Cat, the killer animals featured were these kinda cats:



Feral features...these kinda cats:



and you may scoff and think that a little lap-sized cat is a silly thing to be afraid of, and then i will know you for a dog-owner. any of us who have lived with a cat knows that they may be ostensibly domesticated, but they don’t always have the temperament of a domesticated creature.



cats are highly adaptable



feisty



patient



physics-defying



and persistent



if it were just ONE naughty little killer-cat, you may still have scoffing rights. but what if there were hundreds?



hundreds of cats with the taste for human blood?



hundreds of cats who give zero fucks?



i mean, you know about japan’s cat island, right?



picture these cats, turnt.



it's cute when they come knockin'



but less so when they come nommin'



so anyway, that’s what this book is. what else is this book? terrible. i mean, i’m sorry, but it’s fucking TERRIBLE. i didn’t hate reading it at all (three stars for FUN!), but the writing is shockingly bad, even by pulp horror standards, it would be a generous two.

and maybe you don’t believe me that a horror novel about killer cats from 1974 could be anything other than award-winning prose with a well-constructed storyline and delicately nuanced characters, but don’t worry—i’ll walk you through it.

let’s dig into the plot: a couple moves from the big city to an isolated house on long island for the summer. they get a kitten and name it sneakers and enjoy its company, but at summer’s end, when it is time for them to return to the big city, it’s like their brains melt with WHAT CAN EVEN BE DONE WITH THIS CAT BECAUSE NO ONE HAS EVER OWNED A CAT IN THE CITY BEFORE AND WE MUST RID OURSELVES OF IT BEFORE THE CITY DENIES US RE-ENTRY, and they end up dumping poor sneakers on the lawn of some rando house in the village AT NIGHT because who knows, maybe this family wants a cat! they have kids, after all!

quick interruption to discuss how quickly things move in this book. it begins on page 9 and pages 9-18 are devoted to their being shown the house and deciding to take it. pages 18-28 detail the events of their first summer there, including the entire sneakers story arc. and then on page 29, it’s already the following summer! time flies when you don’t care about your craft! and this second summer is the summer of the cats. there have been, in pages 9-28, hints dropped of feline presence and unusual animal behavior, but now it’s gonna get way catty.

SO—on page 31, they find a dog who has been all tore up by an animal, and they take him to the local vet dr. tucker, who, while smoking a cigarette in the examination room, tells them that the perp was probably a cat. shock and disbelief is expressed until dr. tucker uses his best medical-words to explain cats to them,

"Those cats, those strays—they’re not just wild. They’re crazy. They’re half sick and half starved and, I think, really crazy. They act like it, anyway. I live out Northwest and those woods are full of cats. And there’s more of them every day. Talk about rabbits! Those darn cats will breed three or four times a year.”

“That’s a lot of kittens,” I said.

after that absolute mess of a paragraph, doc tuck goes off on a rant about ’summer people’ who dump cats all over the island when they go back home, forcing the cats to fend for themselves. shock and disbelief shift into deep shame and guilt, and from where i’m sitting, they deserve all the mayhem of what’s to come.

dr. tucker may share my contempt for kitty-abandoners, but my kinship with him was quickly tarnished by his odd and off-brand smug attitude after telling a gruesome story of a cat who, unbeknownst to him, had curled up under the hood of his car to stay warm and was cut in half by the radiator fan:

Amy stared at him. “Ugh,” she said. “That’s horrible!”

“Yeah,” Dr. Tucker said. “I thought so, too. It was a real mess. But it sure got rid of that cat.”

sooooo, not the most consistent feline advocate.

anyway, to take a page from this book and skim over the plot—the area has become overrun by cats. so very many hungry cats who have already ingested most of the local wildlife and are going to have to climb up a rung on that food chain to survive.

our lazily-written couple may be in a less-populated part of the town, but they are not all on their own; they are blessed with several peripheral characters who enter their lives in order to provide ominous exposition about the town's unusual and worsening cat situation, featuring dialogue notable for being among the worst i’ve ever encountered.

a plumber who comes to fix the toilet helps flesh out the feline origin story:

”It’s a nice place,” he said. “It’s real pretty. But I don’t know—I wonder how I’d feel without some neighbors around me.”

“I’ve got a neighbor,” I said. “I understand there’s a family named King just back of the ridge on the Fresh Pond road.”

“You mean Miss King?” he said. “She died last winter.”

“Oh?”

“You never knew her?”

“No.”

“She was some old lady,” he said. “She used to teach at the Amagansett School. I had her myself in the fifth grade. Then she retired, they finally got her to quit, and she started collecting animals. You know—strays. These woods are full of strays. Old Miss King, she’d take in anything that came to the door. She had dogs of every size and shape there is. And cats—she always had a yardful of cats. And I remember one time, she even had a goat.”

He reached out his thumb and pushed the lever and watched the toilet tank fill. He fitted the lid back in place. He picked up his toolbox.

“Old Miss King,” he said. “She must have been close to ninety when she died. They found her dead in her bed one morning—a niece that used to come and see her. She just died away in her sleep.”

“What happened to all her animals?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never heard. I guess they went back where they came from. I guess they went back to the woods. I told you they were strays.”

on a lark, i cut and pasted this passage into https://wordcounttools.com/, which is the resource i use whenever i’m writing a review for LARB or somewhere else where i need to stay within a certain word count. one of the additional features the site provides is a “readability level.” i suspected this one would be low, with its short sentences, basic grammar constructions, and repetition, but i had to laugh when i saw HOW low: 5th-6th grade student. so you don’t have to trust my opinion, but you can’t argue with that Dale-Chall readability score!

a chicken farmer with a yardful of cats of his own—sitting, strolling, sprawling, stretching, preening, sleeping cats. There were black cats and white cats and gray cats and tiger cats and tortoise-shell cats and calico cats and Persian cats and—many strange combinations, provides local color and more detail about local cats:

”That’s quite a collection of cats you’ve got out there. Are they all yours?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I got plenty of them. They just keep coming. I can’t hardly keep track. But, sure—they’re all mine. Every goddam one.” He wiped his hands on a towel and leaned against the counter. “A stray comes along here, I blow his goddam bastard head off.”

INSTANT KINSHIP LOSS #2

he goes on, inspired to one helluva long monologue. you can almost hear the rustling of playbills, the crinkling of hard-candy wrappers:

”Have you had trouble with stray cats?” I said.

“Not no more,” he said. “But I did—I sure hell did. All last spring. I go in a henhouse in the morning. I or this guy I got, and it don’t look right. Something wrong. Last night I got twenty hens in there. Now—I only count nineteen.”

“A cat got one?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to think. The first time, I think, What the hell, I guess I made a mistake. I guess I only got nineteen hens in here. But I only think that once. The next day, I got another hen gone. And then it’s a couple of fryers, or a broiler. So it’s got to be something is getting in the houses at night. But I don’t know what. And I sure hell don’t know how. You know these chicken houses—how they’re built. They got to be rat-proof. When you lock the door, the only way in is the window, and that window is ten feet up. Maybe twelve. So what kind of bastard animal climbs a wall like that and around a push-out window and down another wall and takes a chicken and comes back up and out? I guess maybe I better find out. This guy I got, he goes home most nights. It’s up to me. O.K. This night I don’t go to bed. I take my gun and I go out and find a good place to sit and watch. I don’t smoke or nothing. I just sit and wait. And pretty soon—son of a bitch! Here comes a cat across the field—down from the woods where they live. I watch him come up to a henhouse. I don’t do nothing. I want to see what happens. And when it happens, I just can’t hardly believe it. That goddam cat goes up the side of that henhouse like some kind of human fly. And he twists around the window there just as easy. And in. I hear the hens begin to squawk. And then back the bastard comes. He’s got a hen in his mouth. I let him hit the ground. Then—blam! I’ve got him. There’s nothing left but pieces. I got the hen, too. But i can’t help that. You got to pay to learn. And I sure as hell learned what a hungry cat can do. So the next day, we got some chicken wire and fixed like a screen on all the chicken house windows.

what i will carry in my heart forevermore from this passage is not the sacrifice of the noble, truth-seeking farmer-detective just trying to make ends meet, nor the cat turned into bloody confetti just trying to keep himself from starving. no, what will stay with me in my most reflective moods is the image of A (GODDAM) CAT GOING UP THE SIDE OF A HENHOUSE LIKE SOME KIND OF HUMAN FLY. it is a simile to move one to tears.

other exposition-pals include a birdwatching guide:

We were in some old fields out northwest where the birding is usually fantastic. I don’t understand it. I mean, it’s strange. It’s damn strange. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do. It is strange.”

There was a pause. Payette cleared his throat. “Well, anyway,” he said. “Tell your wife I have her book.”

“I will,” I said, and hung up.

I put a new sheet of paper in my typewriter. But then I got up and walked over to the window. It wasn’t really strange about the birds. Or rather, it was strange, but it wasn’t exactly a mystery. I looked down at the depths of the lilac clump. I thought of the little red finch that had nested there. But it really was strange. It gave me a very strange feeling.

despite the overuse of the word ‘strange,’ this one attains a 9th-10th grade student level!

incidentally, many things in this book are strange: It had been strange to leave and now it was strange to be back. there will be many more instances. feel free to turn it into a drinking game.

there’s also a local stable owner:

”We had some tough years, you know. But we’re beginning to get the breaks. We finally got that new pasture we wanted. And we finally found a really reliable feed company. And we won that lawsuit against that fool that got kicked. And I still can’t believe it—but we’ve finally licked the rat problem. I don’t know what we did right. But it must have been something. Because the rats are gone. I haven’t seen a rat in the stables or anywhere else since way back in the middle of May.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth. We haven’t got any rats.”

“None?”

“None,” he said. “Well—maybe one or two.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean—it just seems strange. I’ve never heard of a stable without rats.”

“Neither have I,” Tom said. “But…” He shrugged. “I’ll give you a call about riding.”

there’s that ‘strange’ again! GLUG! both of these passages are notable for characters who can’t seem to stick to their own stories: is it strange or isn’t it? are there rats or no rats? but they also have the most charmingly abrupt ways of concluding a conversation with a digression. ‘welp, that’s that chapter wrapped up!’

you can tell by what i’ve already (over)shared how bad the writing is, but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. it’s so…lazy.

Sam thumped the floor with his tail. He got slowly up and slowly stretched and moved slowly toward the sofa.

because synonyms are hard. it does leave the reader with one burning question: BUT AT WHAT SPEED DID SAM THUMP THE FLOOR WITH HIS TAIL? WHY SO SECRETIVE, BERTON ROUECHE?

it’s sloppy and repetitive and oddly-phrased.

The tumble of branches was full of cats. I counted seven. I counted eight of them. I counted eleven crouching cats watching me through the branches.

HOLY CATS, I HAVE ALREADY FILLED THE REVIEW SPACE! CONTINUED HERE!

*******

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

REVIEW PART 2, CONTINUED FROM HERE!!

and as for the pacing, the authorial decisions here make no sense. i’ve already mentioned how rushed everything was in the first twenty pages, and that’s true for most of the book, but then there are passages like this that boggle the mind with their unnecessarily granular details.

are you ready for this action sequence that tales place at the post office?

I locked our box and carried the deck of mail across the stale, refrigerated room and spread it out on the counter under the warning: IT IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE TO ASSAULT A POSTAL EMPLOYEE. There was a copy of House & Garden with the cover torn halfway off. There was an appeal from the Environmental Defense Fund. There was a flier from Grant City at Bridgehampton. There was a bill from the Amagansett Lumber Co. There was a catalogue from L.L. Bean. There was a letter from my brother in St. Louis. And there was a big green and gray Modern Science World envelope. That was what I wanted.

good lord, the PADDING!!

and this little bit—were there no editors in 1974?

Amy raised her head. “I just thought of something,” she said. “I know somebody who might have some ideas—somebody who maybe could help.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Tucker,” she said. “You know, the vet. Maybe you could talk to him.”

“I wonder.”

“I thought he was very sympathetic,” she said. “I liked him very much.”

“So did I.”

“Why don’t you call him.”

“I liked the way he talked,” I said. “I think he knew—I think he suspected something. I think maybe you’re right. At least he might listen.”

“I think you ought to call him.”

“I don’t suppose he would be free this afternoon,” I said, “But maybe we could make a date. Maybe for tonight.”

“Jack,” she said. “I want you to call him—right now.”

“Well,” I said.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! OR LESS, I’M NOT SURE.

I opened the telephone directory on the counter in the pantry. It contained three listings for Dr. Tucker. One was Albert C. Tucker DVM res. The second was Albert C. Tucker DVM ofc. The third was Tucker Animal Hopsital. I dialed the hospital number. It was the same as the ofc listing. The number rang, and I waited. It rang and rang. I began to count the rings.

that is a lot of needless description about making a phone call. by contrast, a woman who dies of cat-related septicemia gets only this:

She stood in the doorway, catching her breath.

“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Jack!” She shook her head from side to side. “The most awful thing. I just saw Linda. I ran into her at the store. And Naomi died last night. She’s dead!”

and the chapter ends and then on the next page they are at a cocktail party where something else that no one cares about takes up a chunk of the page:

The bar was a harvest table at the end of the living room, and there was a crazy-looking picture framed in silver on the wall behind it. I found a useful bottle among the empties and poured myself another drink and looked up at the picture. But it wasn’t exactly a picture. It was a coat of arms—the coat of arms of a family named Prather. I thought for a minute, and remembered that Prather was Dorothy Winter’s maiden name. So that cleared that up.

SO THAT CLEARED THAT UP!

the on-page horror is slim. there are many cats. they roam the grounds. they kill the animals. the way cats do. maybe slightly more aggressively in this "many cats/limited resources” situation.

they kill people, but mostly anecdotally—the stray cat biting poor departed naomi, dooming her to septicemia, some children are attacked and succumb to their injuries, etc. there is only one on-page human-killing, and yeah, it’s rad, but all of the human casualties, and many of the animal ones, are delivered offscreen—our hero hears screaming and rushes to see a man with his face torn up by something that was maybe a cat but even the victim is unsure, rabbits and a baby deer are found torn up and eaten by something that maybe could have been a cat, but who even can say, and their dog gets attacked a second time and dies, but unlike the 'mail i have received' sequence, it is so spare with the details, it was not immediately clear whether the animal they found was sam, or if the animal was a corpse or only injured. those details are inconsequential, i suppose. and obviously, duhhh, it is the cats doing all of the things, but it's all just hints and whispers of stuff happening elsewhere while instead, we get to know quite intimately the contents of a man's mailbox.

now, as for cat-on-cat violence, and the trigger-happy retaliation for these cats going to extreme measures to stay alive—there's a lot of that on-page. many cats getting gunned down. many furry corpses. many cats falling on the bodies of their fallen brethren and eating them. which is a solemn death ritual in some human cultures, so let’s not judge these cats for their grieving rites. be a little more woke, yeah?

i'm on the side of the cats here, who are the clear victims of this story. you abandon a hunter, it's gonna hunt. you shoot cats who are just out roaming your property, maybe looking for food that isn't you, you deserve whatever pushback you get. you feed strays and you get bit and diseased, that's on you. the people in this book were very dumb. the man is an editor for a science publication and he refers to these cats as "prototype tigers," proving he has no clue about evolution and should be in a different line of work, and *karen's hot take* deserves to be outsmarted by cats.

one good thing, though, is that during dr. dummy's scene, he discusses how resourceful cats are; that dogs are bad at surviving on their own, while cats thrive. this allows me to plug the verybest cat book i have ever read, The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World, which discusses this, and other fascinating cat-info, in great detail. you should read that book. you can read this one, too—it's a bunch of dumb fun, but The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World is a must-read for the cat-mad booknerd.

i'm running out of reviewing-steam, and i've already dragged this on way longer than i ought to have, but i do want to share the blurbs, because the praise for this book is bewildering!

"Pure horror fiction at its nightmarish best!"

-Washington Post

"This one could scare the daylights out of you."

-San Francisco Examiner

"A brilliant little horror"

-Los Angeles Times

"The most frightening takeover since The Day of the Triffids"

-Kirkus Reviews

"Action-packed suspense"

-The New York Times

"A chilling novel...reminiscent of the great classic fantasy, The Birds"

-Portland Oregonian

"A shocker...hair-raising"

-Bestsellers

"A climax that is bloody , shocking; as terrifying as...The Birds"

-Publishers Weekly

"Mounts inexorably to a horrifying climax"

-Pittsburgh Press

"A feline Jaws...Roueché develops it with his impeccable timing and step-by-step respect for suspense."

-The New York Times Book Review

"The story builds to a screeching climax of horror."

-Minneapolis Tribune

"A humdinger of a scare story"

-Los Angeles Times

so scary!!



although i disagree with alla that, i will continue to explore pulpy-bad cat-horror; i'm still itching to track down nick sharman’s The Cats in my desired cover:



come to my blog!

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

A couple abandon a cat when they move. They are bothered by feral cats. The cats kill a cop. A posse shoots all of the cats.

Pad that out to 124 pages with polite conversation with neighbors and calling local government agencies, and you have Berton Roueche's Feral.

The prose was so basic and childlike, in a "See Dick Run" kind of way, that I had to check if it was originally written in a foreign language and translated by first year students.

"Then the cats were on him. They were all over him."

The above is from the thrilling murder of a policeman by a horde of cats. The only human death on page in the entire book. There were some other killings mentioned off hand, and some loose threads about the cats being unnaturally big or infected with horrible diseases, but they weren't picked up on. The back cover copy heavily implies that the cats are eating people, but there's not really any of that in the story.

What I thought was the climax ended up being an epilogue, with a cheap stinger at the end of a trash can being knocked over, because, sweet heaven, there might still be a cat in the world!

Still, I would love to see a movie of this. I could watch people shotgun cats all day.

More reviews at Trash Menace.

[Ellen the Herbivore · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I heard of this book, I ordered it immediately because my sister adores Roueche's medical mysteries and is crazy in love with cats. But then I realized that cats might not be the good guys in this book, so I decided to read it myself first. I will not be sharing it with her.

No idea why Roueche, who was normally a good and interesting writer, decided to churn out this itty-bitty uninspired horror story, but here's a hint. Feral was published in 1974 and takes place on the eastern end of Long Island. (I love the jacket blurb, which ends "This is a frightening book, and, after you've read it, you'll probably never want to go near Long Island." Nah.) The movie "Jaws" came out that year and was set in approximately that place. (I thought "Jaws" was also set on the eastern end of Long Island, but some argue that it was supposed to be off Massachusetts instead.)

But this is a truly awful book, as other reviewers have beautifully explained. (So I won't bother to.)

So, Roueche tried but failed to capitalize on the "horror on Long Island" genre, and fans of such things had to wait until 1979's "The Amityville Horror" for more blood and guts from the eastern edge of NY.

[Marley · Rating 3 out of 5]

We all know our cats want us dead. Well Feral "proves" it.

A guy I worked with picked up this book for a few cents at a thrift store. It was in the kid's section, but his 10 year old didn't like it. So I inherited it. In a way this is one of the dumbest books I've ever read. The kitties aren't cute. They're feral killer cats who will eat you down to the bone. (It would be more fun if it were LOL's dong the job. Outside of not being well written (but OK--only there should have been some follow-ups that didn't happen), not enough people got gnawed. I'd especially like to see Amy bite it--or rather be bitten. The ending was pretty expected, still the idea of having your house surrounded by 400 angry, hungry , yowling cats is rather scary and the townspeople who object to doing something about it even scarier. Their eventual dispatching reminded me of The Walking Dead. After a while, they cease to be cats, just something to whack at. The book was turned into a made-for-TV film, Strays.

This is a very quick read. I read it in about 2 1/2 hours.

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh-ow

[Quentin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is undoubtedly the worst book I have ever read, and could well be the single worst book in existence. It's actually quite repulsive that Goodreads' rating system forces me to bestow it a star. 'Feral' deserves deserves nothing of the sort: zero stars, or perhaps a number of negative stars. Every single aspect of this book is egregious, saved only by the fact that it comes in at a mere 124 pages of oversized font.

I honestly believe that a dim-witted six year old with limited English could have written this abomination. The characters are superficial and without any development. The plot is painfully obvious, not helped by the repeated foreshadowing throughout: "I think it was ... a cat!" "What? A cat!?" "Yes, a cat!" - typical of the profound and multi-dimensional dialogue to be found on basically every page. The ending is predictable, but comes as some relief, much like the ending of a war or a nightmare.

The worst thing is that Berton Roueche is apparently a well-credentialled author, and doesn't seem to have written this book in jest or irony. I think he genuinely believes this rag is a thrilling novella. It really does cast a poor light on his previous employers, as well as the entire state of Missouri, and, frankly, the English language. It is truly peerless in the literary world. The only comparison I can think of is to Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" - but at least Wiseau had the sense to go with the tide and re-brand his anathemic movie as a black comedy. If Roueche could do so post-humously and 44 years post-publication it would bring a lone bright spot to this terrible black mark he has left on the literary world.

[Steve Isaak · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bland and predictable 124-page entry in the nature-gone-wild horror genre. Feral isn't badly written, but there's nothing in this novella that you haven't read before in better versions of this storyline. The characters are cardboard, the author's slow-build-into-terror runs too long and lengthwise, this should have been a short story.

Near the end, there are a few suspenseful moments, which made Feral an almost-worthwhile fast-moving afternoon read (I read it in forty-five minutes), but not quite. Don't even borrow this from the library.


(This review originally appeared on the Reading & Writing By Pub Light site.)

[Geoffwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Take one part underdeveloped post-Jaws "nature hates you" narrative, one part underdeveloped Bob Barker "spay or neuter your pets" moral, and one part "wait, medical detective Berton Roueché?" and hey that's a weird book.

[Scott Nieradka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, if you want a 120 pages of man vs stray cats "action", this book is for you. I assure you, the main character kills a good 74 cats and 4 kittens with his shotgun. The cats only kill one guy on screen. It is, of course, not a remotely fair fight.

Well on the positive side, the enemy are just normal every day stray cats. And the writing isn't quite as god-awful as you would expect. It feels like a made for tv movie script. 60 pages of ham-fisted foreshadowing and all. Actually, that is not positive. But, hey. They cant also seem to decide if this takes place in the wilds of Long Island, or the Oregon coast, there seem to be references to both. Our cat massacring hero is a copyeditor, you think he would notice.

On the negative side, the cats are woefully ineffective, as cats tend to be, they killed one person (well two but one was by infection from a small bite, so it doesn't count), a dog, a deer, a possum, a baby bunny, and a nest of birds. Not a great death toll, a lot of lost potential, for four hundred ravenous cats. Especially since we are promised CATS EATING PEOPLE. Not person, people. Yeesh.

[Alan Smithee · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book thinking it was one of the original 'novel nasties' like Arthur Herzog III's The Swarm or James Herbert's The Rats.

It isn't.

This is more of a short story that's been padded out into novella length. It's about a rather dull couple who buy a house only to find there's a large colony of feral cats in a nearby woods. If you want to know more, I'd doing a chapter summary here. Otherwise, avoid this one.

[A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

A cut-rate Cujo with kittens!

I'm not sure what I can say about this book that isn't used by its various taglines: "Guess who they're having for dinner...", "All those nice little cats. They're not so finicky anymore.", and the mildly ominous (not really. more laugh-inducing) "DINNER TIME."

Frankly, the only surprising thing about this book is that the majority of the 'characters' make it out alive. Quite a disappointment. The conversations are so banal that I kind of hated every single character.

Final verdict: I was rooting for the cats. Poor kittens.

[Debra]

Stephen King recommended book as noted in Chapter 9 of Berkley's 1983 paperback edition of Danse Macabre.

[Katherine Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it in a day! And I really like cats lol!

[Zach Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Then the cats were on him. They were all over him."

2025 reading so far: First, I finished Anna Karenina, which many people call the greatest novel of the 19th century, and followed it up with this 174-page piece of gutter trash about killer kitty cats. I think that sums me up as a reader and as a person pretty dang well.

This is horrendous. Author Berton Roueché was allegedly a medical writer who wrote for The New Yorker, but this is written with the same level of prose and complexity as a Goosebumps book. Setting, time, and characters are described so briefly and haphazardly that I could rarely tell when or where anything was taking place. We spend pages with the main character flipping through his mail, but deaths occur and are then brushed instantly under the rug so we can read about a cocktail party instead.

It's a fascinating read. Utter incompetence that you can read in one sitting! Lots of laughs and WTF moments. If you make it to the end, you get a policeman torn to pieces by cats, the entire police department going out into the forest with an armory's worth of guns, and the off-screen felinicide of "thousands" of cats. Amazing.

[Tome Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. It kept me entertained enough to finish. Lots of pointless filler in such a short novel. Not enough human deaths and one of a child is not even seen and when mentioned it’s in poor detail. Very interesting premise but not executed well. I wish the abandoned cat played a bigger role. Ending was kinda boring and anticlimactic. Easy to read and somewhat fun so it isn’t a total bust though I guess. I’ve definitely read worse.

[Jeff Francis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel is Purrr-fect!

No, actually it’s not. Far from it, in fact. But I couldn’t resist making fun of that hackneyed pun. Sooo…

It took me about two days to read “Feral,” which is appropriate, because I’d guess that’s how long it took the author to write it.

Really, compared to the other reviewers, I’m a defender of this book. Yes, there’s zero character development (a young couple buys a home in the country… seriously, that’s about it for character development), and the prose is mostly of the this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened variety. Yet, the central conceit of the novel (cats abandoned by those who summer in a rural area eventually form a feral horde in the deep forest) is compelling, and where the author takes it does tease the reader’s imagination.

P.S. Stephen King praised it that much!? Interesting…

P.P.S. I just learned from a blog (the excellent “Too Much Horror Fiction”) that the author wrote for the “New Yorker” for half a century… weird.

[Matthew Nowik · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a book about killer feral cats. It reads like a cheap B movie and if you go into this book knowing these things, you’ll enjoy it. Again, this book is about killer feral cats. Who am I to criticize small things such as no real plot, weird time jumps, and vanilla dialogue? I’m here to see cats kill people, or at least scratch them badly. Does that happen in this book? It does. Does it also feel like it could weirdly morph into a Rambo tie-in? Again, yes. John Rambo would have ended this book after 15 pages, so it’s good that THIS particular Vietnam vet wasn’t called in to help with the killer feral cat problem.

Do you understand this review? If the answer is NO, you’re going to love the hell out of this book.

[Jason Kron · Rating 2 out of 5]

The cover is way better than the book is. The prose is so bare-bones that it's an interesting stylistic choice. But none of the characters are interesting and the action doesn't get cooking until the second half, and even then it doesn't get crazy enough for this kind of story. Because it's so hard to make cats scary, I think that it would've been better if it was either all-out insane and absurd (like Nick Sharman's "The Cats") or if the author gave personality and emotional backstory to the animals (like in Jerold Mundis's "The Dogs" or David Fisher's "The Pack").

[Claire McCaffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I actually liked it. At times, it gave me Fargo or The Fugitive vibes. I could see it being a sort of bad 80s or 90s movie, but it kept me engaged. It's a totally ridiculous story about stray cats that reproduced and are now wild and keep attacking people for food. It doesn't have a lot of depth either... I guess the main message would be don't abandon your pets!

[Casey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this a long time ago, if memory serves me correctly there was just a lot of periods making it a very jarring read. I think it would've been a good novel without the over use of punctuation. I was disappointed since I really enjoy horror novels with the main villain being an animal.

[Joshua Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Daft dialog. Uninteresting characters. Even the cats seem fairly tame. Unfortunately, the main characters, a bland married couple, were not shredded to bits as they ought to have been abandoning a pet cat on the roadside. Mercifully short.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick read. Time capsule of 1970s attitudes about abandoning animals. Not scary; more like realism within the parameters of the story. Don’t read if you like cats; disturbing images, especially at the end of the book.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author came up with a great idea for a novel. It could have been horror, suspense, or supernatural. But, he doesn't follow through. What was 135 pages should have been 300 or more.

[Katy Lohman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Talk about karma taking too big of a bite back!

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hundreds of wild cats cause havoc in a small village. Dozens of cats staring and walking towards you with teeth protruding and claws extending. Creepy setting and a bit of a slow burn. Could of had some more gore and kills.

[Lee Fehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

As thou have forsaken Sneakers, thou have forsaken me - God

[Leila Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good quick horror read.

Spoiler:


Animals are harmed in this book, in case you are sensitive to that. The cats are trying to kill us.

[Signor Mambrino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good!

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was rooting for the cats the whole time.