7/11/26
My stepdaughter is visiting for the weekend, so no lengthy Blog today.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 80
The Hunger by Alma Katsu
"Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark." --Stephen King
A tense and gripping reimagining of one of America's most haunting human disasters: the Donner Party with a supernatural twist.
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, unknowingly propelling them into 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. Effortlessly combining the supernatural and the historical, The Hunger is an eerie, thrilling look at the volatility of human nature, pushed to its breaking point.
I am old enough to remember my great-grandparents, who were born in the 1896 and 1900, respectively. My great-grandmother used to talk about winters back then, and how they “crept”. I remember her using that term. Without meteorologists and 24/7 weather data, winter creeped. So, too, it must have crept for the Donner Party after taking that ill-advised Hasting Cutoff shortcut in 1846. They must have watched winter creeping up on them, knowing they couldn’t escape it. And I imagine the steady, relentless slowness of that approaching doom made things all the more terrifying for them.
The same can be said of The Hunger — Alma Katsu’s horror-take on the Donner Party. The horror and weirdness begin early on, but it is an unapologetically slow burn that achieves two things simultaneously — building up empathy for these characters by spending time with each of them, and increasing the dread and anxiety page by page, chapter by chapter. Those are the two most effective ingredients in any horror writer’s cookbook, and Alma applies them here masterfully. I very much enjoyed it. Will absolutely appeal to fans of The Terror by Dan Simmons.
Which leads me to the main line of criticism I see leveled at this book — a line of criticism that I think is ridiculous. I’m not talking about readers who personally find the book too slow for them, or don’t like the ending. Those are personal things for individual readers, and we should never judge or begrudge for that. Hell, if we derided every reader or reviewer who didn’t like the ending to one of my books, there wouldn’t be many readers or reviewers left.
No, what I’m talking about is the grumbling in some online circles about the book’s lack of historical accuracy, which can be boiled down to ‘Nothing supernatural happened to the Donner Party in real life, so who does this woman think she is applying it in a novel?’ One amateur Reddit historian, for example, complained: “the weirdly horny character assassination of real people completely ruined it for me.” It is curious that we never saw the same complaints leveled at Dan Simmons The Terror, itself another slow burn fictionalized account (with a possible supernatural twist) of another historical tragedy, namely Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. I’m pretty sure Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, a vampire hunter, nor did the real-life Jesse James hook up with Frankenstein’s Daughter, but nobody seemed to have a problem with those, either.
But fuck those people. If you’re looking for a historical horror novel that slowly builds and layers the dread and refuses to tie everything up neatly in a little bow for you, then y an’t go wrong with The Hunger. Available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Putnam.
