The Hunger

The Hunger

By Alma Katsu

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.

As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

What was incredibly startling to me was how little of The Hunger was made up.  There was so much bad shit going on with that wagon train from Day 1, a supernatural explanation was practically required. Mysterious deaths, fraudulent trail blazers, literal SIGNS telling you to go back?  Honestly, this book is spooky in all the right ways; I had nightmares after reading it.

The Hunger may not be completely surprising (I mean, I did have to tell my thirty-three year old boyfriend what happened to the Donner Party, but I think that's because he emo'd his way through grade school and didn't pay attention in class) but it incorporates real events and horror very seamlessly.  There's a lot of characters involved (there were around 80 members of the Party) but Katsu wisely focuses on just a few narrators.  Some of the ominous forebodings do turn out to be red herrings - Stanton's early dalliance with Tamsen Donner and subsequent significant looks winds up having no bearing on any of the action later.  Nor, in fact, does anything have to do with Tamsen's supposed witchcraft.

Did I guess who the evildoer was?  Um, not really, even though it was perfectly clear from the prologue.  Again, the facts aligned so easily, I'm not even sure how you explain his actions and survival in a non-supernatural way.  That being said, Katsu's job had to have been incredibly hard, to interweave the truth and fiction as well as she did. Although I imagine it helped to have a truth stranger-than-fiction. 

I very much enjoyed it, although for whatever reason I didn't find the last half as quietly engrossing and unsettling as the first half - perhaps because I anticipated death, perhaps because the monster you see is not always as frightening as the one you imagine. There's also relatively little gore, it seems like a lot of it takes place off-page.  All-in-all a very engrossing and semi-unusual horror story, given the setting and characters.  Five (severed and eaten) thumbs up!


38: A Novel Based On A True Story