Kameron Hurley is one of my favorite authors. Her fiction is gritty, weird, and surprising in the best kind of way, and her essays are both on-point and out of this world. She also has a Patreon where she posts short stories every month; The One We Feed was the November 2017 story. It's also mindbending, post-apocalyptic, and all about monsters, both in the world and in our heads.

The world is dying, and we share it with monsters. In the small town where the story takes place, some people say that they're going out to hunt the monsters - but are they really killing them, or are they 'romancing' them - having sex with them, and more broadly learning to share the world with them? Each of us has two monsters in their head - the good and the bad. Which would you choose to feed?

There are tentacles. The narrator has a truly distinctive voice. The world is fucked and no one is safe - and yet we still get some hope. This is a great story in Hurley's usual weird vein, and totally worth your time (and the $1 it takes to get access to it).

This review first appeared on my blog. ( )