Predators by Michaelbrent Collings

Predators by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those books I suspect would have done better as a live-action thriller on screen or a graphic novel rather than novel. I admit my interest was piqued when the author approached me to do the review, since I am an African and have done the whole 'African safari' thing. So I guess I'd be kinda in the know. And I get it – I don't often have this sort of novel set in Africa land on my desk.

This is survival horror, brutal and bloody. So if that's not your cuppa joe, step away from this book. This is not for you.

We kick the story off with a cast of characters, many of them women who have been damaged by the men in their lives, and they're all off on safari with all manner of dysfunction playing in the background. Except the safari doesn't quite go as planned, and the survivors end up being hunted down by a ravening pack of preternaturally vicious hyenas that made me wonder if these hyenas weren't perhaps demon possessed or something, because amateur conservationist that I am, I'm not hundreds sold on the idea of hyenas behaving quite the way they do in this book. But anyhow, this is a work of fiction, so I'm going to suspend disbelief. People die and the survivors are pushed to their physical and psychological limits. Gruesomely. Rescue isn't likely. The end.

I *get* that the author intended to show a bunch of women being strong in the face of adversity. I *get* that he did a lot of research to make this feel like an 'authentic' African experience. But as an African reader, the whole time I felt like this was a non-African author trying too hard to create an authentic experience for me as a reader, and it didn't quite hit the mark. Don't get me wrong, Collings is a strong writer, but it didn't quite hang together for me in Predators. Whether it was the lack of motivations for certain events that happened (like the catalyst for when things really go wrong at the start that's never truly explained) or for me what felt a bit like contrived back-stories for each woman whose life is defined by the fact that she is hard done by the men in her life, I remain lukewarm at best. If this had been a film, that focused on the act of survival and perhaps a sisterhood that grows out of adversity without dwelling on the demons of the past, this might've worked better for me. And also, just a note, from a technical aspect, this book had a bucketload of little typos – so a more thorough proofread could have helped.

This is not a bad book, just not quite my cuppa, and if survival horror is your thing, you're probably going to ignore the other aspects that didn't work for me.