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The Hunger Kindle Edition

by Alma Katsu (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 5,424 ratings

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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"Supernatural suspense at its finest...The best thing about The Hunger is that it will scare the pants off you."--The New York Times Book Review

"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 fascinating historical moments: 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. 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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An NPR Best Horror Novel
A Suspense Magazine Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Western Heritage Award
Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award
Finalist for the Locus Award

And one of...

The New York Times's 50 States, 50 Scares Picks
O, The Oprah Magazine's Scariest Books of All Time
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“Supernatural suspense at its finest...It is strangely ethereal, yet gritty...But the best thing about The Hunger is that it will scare the pants off you....Enjoy the journey, one so entertaining that you almost don't mind feeling queasy at dinner.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Not only will Alma Katsu's acclaimed novel haunt you, it will give you empathy for the people forced to undergo such horrors." —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Katsu shows an acute understanding of human nature.…[She] is at her best when she forces her readers to stare at the almost unimaginable meeting of ordinary people and extraordinary desperation, using her sharp, haunting language.” —USA Today

“A reimagining of the ill-fated Donner Party but with an eerie supernatural twist.” —New York Post

“The Donner Party will never not be fascinating, and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger somehow makes the man-eating story all the more enticing.”–BookRiot

"Equal parts unputdownable and must-put-it-down-or-I-am-going-to-have-a-heart-attack...You travel into this book and there is no escape. Katsu is an exceptionally gifted writer and the dread-soaked pages are with me every day as both a writer and a scaredy cat.” —Caroline Kepnes for TODAY.com

“Combines meticulous historical research and a keen understanding of human nature with a monstrous original metaphor to reimagine the ill-fated Donner-Reed party as a haunted endeavor, doomed from its first mile.” —Salon

"The Hunger is full of foreboding and humanity." —Refinery29

“The Hunger is being described as ‘the Donner Party with a supernatural twist,’ and it sure delivers on the spooky premise.” —Bustle

“[The Hunger] is as rich in history as it is disturbing.” —Vulture

"Katsu retells the haunting story of the Donner Party—shining a light on the darkest parts of human nature while incorporating a chilling supernatural element." —AARP

“Much like Dan Simmons's The Terror, Alma Katsu's accomplished, engrossing novel weaves a cocoon of supernatural horror around historical tragedy....The atmosphere of doom becomes as thick as the snow that eventually halts the pioneers' progress. It's a beautifully intense read.” —The Financial Times (UK)

“The Hunger by Alma Katsu takes the tragic tale of the Donner Party and infuses it with hints of witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy, cannibalism and zombiism in a tale that is fated to become the latest Donner Party-inspired horror movie.” —True West Magazine

"Katsu grips and tormets readers with an eerie, well-researched facsimile of 19th-century America, vivid imagery of the harsh pioneering life, and the gnawing suggestion that malevolence, and not merely bad luck, may have shaped the Donner Party's fate." —Matador Network

"In the case of The Hunger, inspired by the travails of the Donner Party, Alma Katsu blends evocative images of the American West with unnerving scenes of the supernatural, making for a uniquely gripping read." —InsideHook

“Katsu injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party....Fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“For fans of historical fiction and the supernatural, Katsu’s goosebumpy and spooky plot makes for an original and surprising read.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A suspenseful and imaginative take on a famous tragedy.” —Booklist

“An inventive reimagining...Westward migration, murder, sensation: the story of the Donner Party has all this....Katsu creates a riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances....The tensions [she] creates are thrilling.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Grips readers from the opening paragraphs and doesn’t let go. Full of richly drawn and fascinatingly flawed characters, this is a story that is respectful of the history it relates, but doesn’t shy away from the sins, mistakes and bigotry of the past, to impressive effect.” —RT Book Reviews

“The isolation is anxiety-inducing and the tension is perfect....Well-written and gripping with a strong conclusion, The Hunger is an inventive take on an already morbidly fascinating historical event. Recommended.” —Historical Novel Society

“Escalating terror and excitement, leading to an ending that's beyond unsettling... Katsu does a remarkable job of transforming a true story into a hard-to-put-down work of fiction.... Unique, literary and entertaining.” —The Oklahoman

“Take the already gruesome Donner Party story, add a wagonload of frightening supernatural elements, and you have the ingredients that animate this chilling novel….A compulsively addictive retooling of historical fact.” —Brandeis Magazine

“An unsettling and slow-burning tale that combines history and the supernatural that sure to please anyone with interest in either.” —SF Reader

“It's a testament to Katsu's skill as a writer that she creates characters so compelling that we can't help hoping they will escape the fate we knew was hurtling toward them the moment we opened the book. She ends the novel with an image of sacrifice and an image of reconciliation, each of them powerful and affecting. They give the book a melancholy resonance. It's a fine novel.” —Locus Magazine

“Author Alma Katsu is one of the genre’s new stars, and her reimagining of the Donner Party tragedy is one reason why.” —Mental Floss

“Katsu dangles the grisliest elements of the story just out of reach. . . . For those who appreciate authenticity and great character work, it’s a piece of historical horror that takes exactly the route it should.” –Esquire

“Alma Katsu has taken one of the darkest and most chilling episodes in our history, and made the story even darker, even more terrifying. I swear I'm still shuddering. A fantastic read!” —R.L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series

“Like The Revenant but with an insistent supernatural whisper. The setting and the story are utterly chilling. And the telling of it is so well done.” —Sarah Pinborough, author of Behind Her Eyes

“The Hunger is a terrific historical novel with a thrilling, bloody twist. Alma Katsu’s brilliant reimagining of the Donner party’s fate is rich with character, laden with imminent doom, and propelled by chilling mystery. A novel that book clubs and dark fiction fans should devour with equal relish.” —Christopher Golden, author of Ararat and Snowblind

“If you think the story of the Donner Party can’t get more horrific, think again. In this gripping, atmospheric reimagining of that dark tale, Katsu has created a deeply unsettling and truly terrifying masterpiece.” —Jennifer McMahon, author of Burntown and The Winter People

“An uneasy, nauseous, slow-burning tale that marries historical fiction with a hint of the supernatural. Great detailing; colorful characterization; some supremely ominous stuff, but always reined in at the final moment to rack up the tension even more. Loved it!” —Joanne Harris, author of Different Class and Chocolat

“The Hunger is a bold and brilliant novel, heavy with foreboding and dread, and with a rich vein of humanity at its core. I challenge you to read it without experiencing your own hunger pangs.” —Tim Lebbon, author of Relics and The Silence

“In an audacious twist, Alma Katsu has made something new and suspenseful from the legendary story of the Donner Party. The Hunger is filled with terror, pity, and grue.” —Keith Donohue, author of The Boy Who Drew Monsters and The Stolen Child

About the Author

Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of eight novels, most recently Red London, The Fervor, and Red Widow. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND, the global policy think tank. Katsu is a graduate of the masters writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelors degree from Brandeis University. She lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband, where she is a consultant to government and private industry on future trends and analytic methods.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

To Charles Stanton, there was nothing like a good, close shave.

He stood that morning in front of the big mirror strapped to the side of James Reed's wagon. In every direction, the prairie unfurled like a blanket, occasionally rippled by wind: mile after uninterrupted mile of buffalo grass, disrupted only by the red spire of Chimney Rock, standing like a sentry in the distance. If he squinted, the wagon train looked like children's toys scattered in the vast, unending brush-flimsy, meaningless, inconsequential.

He turned to the mirror and steadied the blade under his jaw, remembering one of his grandfather's favorite expressions: A wicked man hides behind a beard, like Lucifer. Stanton knew plenty of men who were happy enough with a well-honed knife, even some who used a hatchet, but for him nothing would do but a straight razor. He didn't shrink from the feel of cold metal against his throat. In fact, he kind of liked it.

"I didn't think you were a vain man, Charles Stanton"-a voice came from behind him-"but if I didn't know any better, I might wonder if you weren't admiring yourself." Edwin Bryant came toward him with a tin cup of coffee in his hand. The smile faded quickly. "You're bleeding."

Stanton looked down at the razor. It was streaked with red. In the mirror he saw a line of crimson at his throat, a gaping three-inch slash where the tip of his blade had been. The razor was so sharp that he hadn't felt a thing. Stanton jerked the towel from his shoulder and pressed it to the wound. "My hand must have slipped," he said.

"Sit down," Bryant said. "Let me take a look at it. I have a little medical training, you know."

Stanton sidestepped Bryant's outstretched hand. "I'm fine. It's nothing. A mishap." That was this damnable journey, in a nutshell. One unexpected "mishap" after another.

Bryant shrugged. "If you say so. Wolves can smell blood from two miles away."

"What can I do for you?" Stanton asked. He knew that Bryant hadn't come down the wagon train just to talk, not when they were supposed to be yoking up. Around them, the regular morning chaos whirled. Teamsters herded the oxen, the ground rumbling beneath the animals' weight. Men dismantled their tents and loaded them into their wagons, or smothered out fires beneath sand. The air was filled with the sound of children shouting as they carried buckets of water for the day's drinking and washing.

Stanton and Bryant hadn't known each other long but had quickly developed a friendship. The party Stanton had been traveling with prior-a small wagon train out of Illinois, consisting mostly of the Donner and Reed families-had recently joined up with a much larger group led by a retired military man, William Russell, outside Independence, Missouri. Edwin Bryant had been one of the first members from the Russell party to introduce himself and seemed to gravitate to Stanton, perhaps because they were both single men in a wagon train full of families.

In appearance, Edwin Bryant was Stanton's opposite. Stanton was tall, strong without trying to be. He had been complimented on his good looks his entire life. It had all come from his mother, as far as he could tell. He had her thick, wavy dark brown hair and soulful eyes.

Thy looks are a gift from the devil, boy, so you might tempt others to sin. Another of his grandfather's pronouncements. Once he'd smashed Stanton's face with a belt buckle, maybe hoping to chase out the devil he saw there. It hadn't worked. Stanton had kept all his teeth, and his nose had healed. The scar on his forehead had faded. The devil, as far as he knew, had stayed.

Bryant was probably a decade older. Years as a newspaperman had left him softer than most of the men on the journey, who were farmers or carpenters or blacksmiths, men who made a living through hard physical labor. He had weak eyes and needed a pair of spectacles almost constantly. He had a perpetually disheveled air, as though his thoughts were always elsewhere. There was no denying that he was sharp, though, probably the smartest man in the party. He'd admitted to having spent a few years as a doctor's apprentice when he was very young, though he didn't want to be pressed into service as the camp physician.

"Take a look at this." Bryant kicked a tuft of vegetation at their feet, sending up a puff of dust. "Have you noticed? The grass is dry for this time of year."

They had been traveling on a flat plain for days now, the horizon a long stretch of tall prairie grass and scrub. Flanking the trail on either side in the distance, sand hills of gold and coral rose and fell, some craggy as fingers, pointing directly to heaven. Stanton crouched low and pulled a few strands of grass. The blades were short, no more than nine or ten inches long, and were already faded to a dull brownish-green. "Looks like there was a drought not too long ago," Stanton said. He stood, smacking the dirt off his palms, looking toward the far-off hazy purple scrim. The land seemed to stretch on forever.

"And we're just entering the plain," Bryant pointed out.

His meaning was clear: There might not be enough grass for their oxen and livestock to eat. Grass, water, wood: the three things a wagon train needed. "Conditions are worse than we thought they'd be, and we've got a long way to go. See that mountain range off in the distance? That's just the beginning, Charles. There are more mountains behind those-and desert and prairie, and rivers wider and deeper than any we've crossed so far. All between us and the Pacific Ocean."

Stanton had heard this litany before. Bryant had said little else ever since they had come across the trapper's shack at Ash Hollow two days ago. The empty shack had been turned into a frontier outpost of sorts for the pioneers crossing the plains, who had taken to leaving letters behind for the next eastbound traveler to carry to a real post office for delivery onward. Many of these letters were simply folded pieces of paper left under a rock in the hope that they would eventually reach the intended recipient back home.

Stanton had been strangely comforted by the sight of all those letters. They had seemed a testament to the travelers' love of freedom and desire for greater opportunity, no matter the risk. But Bryant had gotten agitated. Look at all these letters. Must be dozens of them, maybe a hundred. The settlers who wrote them are ahead of us on the trail. We're among the last to head out this season and you know what that means, don't you? he'd asked Stanton. We might be too late. The mountain passes will be closed off by snow come winter, and winter comes early in higher elevations.

"Patience, Edwin," Stanton said now. "We've barely put Independence behind us-"

"Yet here it is the middle of June. We're moving too slowly."

Slinging the towel back over his shoulder, Stanton looked around him: The sun had been up for hours and yet they hadn't broken camp. All around him, families were still finishing their breakfasts over the remains of their campfires. Mothers stood dandling babies in their arms as they swapped gossip. A boy was out playing with a dog instead of herding the family's oxen in from the field.

"Can you blame them on such a fine morning?" he asked lightly. After weeks on the trail, no one was anxious to face another day. Half the men were only in a hurry when it came time to break out the jug of mash. Bryant only frowned. Stanton rubbed the back of his neck. "Anyway, Russell is the man to talk to."

Bryant grimaced as he stooped to retrieve his coffee cup. "I've talked to Russell about it and he agrees, and yet does nothing about it. The man can't say no to anyone. Earlier in the week-you remember-he let those men go off on a buffalo hunt, and the train sat idle for two days to smoke and dry the meat."

"We might be happy for that meat farther down the trail."

"I guarantee you that we'll see more buffalo. But we'll never get those days back."

Stanton saw the sense in what Bryant said, and didn't want to argue. "Look. I'll go with you tonight and we'll speak to Russell together. We'll make him see that we're serious."

Bryant shook his head. "I'm tired of waiting. That's what I've come to tell you: I'm leaving the wagon train. A few of us men are going ahead on horseback. It's too slow by wagon. The family men, I understand why they need their wagons. They have young children, the old and sick to carry. They have their goods to worry about. I don't begrudge them, but I won't be held hostage by them, either."

Stanton thought of his own wagon, his pair of oxen. The outfit had cost nearly all the money he made from the sale of his store. "I see."

Bryant's eyes were bright behind his glasses. "That rider who joined up with us last night, he told me that the Washoe were still south of their usual grazing territory, about two weeks down the trail. I can't risk missing them." Bryant fancied himself to be a bit of an amateur anthropologist and was supposedly writing a book about the various tribes' spiritual beliefs. He could talk for hours about Indian legends-talking animals, trickster gods, spirits that seemed to live in the earth and wind and water-and was so passionate that some of the settlers had become suspicious of him. As much as Stanton enjoyed Bryant's stories, he knew they could be terrifying to Christians raised solely on Bible stories, who couldn't understand that a white man could be deeply fascinated by native beliefs.

"I know these people are your friends. But for God's sake," Bryant continued. When he was excited about a subject, it was hard to get him to drop it. "What made them think they could bring their entire households with them to California?"

Stanton couldn't help but smile. He knew, of course, what Bryant was referring to: George Donner's great, customized prairie schooner. It had been the talk of Springfield when it was built and had become the talk of the entire wagon train. The wagon bed had been built up an extra few feet so there was room for a bench and a covered storage area. It even had a small stove with its chimney vented through the cloth canopy.

Bryant nodded toward the Donners' campsite. "I mean, how do they expect to cross the mountains with something like that? It's a behemoth. Even four yoke of oxen won't be enough to haul it up the steep grades. And for what? To carry the queen of Sheba in comfort." In the short time since the Springfield contingent had joined up with the larger Russell party, Edwin Bryant had developed a healthy dislike for Tamsen Donner, that was plain enough. "Have you seen inside that thing? Like Cleopatra's pleasure barge, with its feather mattress and silks." Stanton smirked. It wasn't as though the Donners were sleeping inside; their wagon was packed with household goods-including bedding-like every other wagon. Bryant was a little prone to righteous exaggeration. "I'd thought George Donner was a smart fellow. Apparently not."

"Can you blame him for wanting to make his wife happy?" Stanton asked. He wanted to think of George Donner as a friend, but he couldn't. Not knowing of Donner's connections.

And now, to make matters worse, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes off Donner's wife. Tamsen Donner was a good twenty years younger than her husband and bewitchingly beautiful, possibly the most beautiful woman Stanton had ever met. She was like one of those porcelain dolls you saw in a dressmaker's shop, modeling the latest French fashions in miniature. She had a cunning look in her eyes he found himself drawn to, and the tiniest waist, so small that a man could circle it with his two hands. Several times, he'd had to stop himself from thinking about how that waist would feel in his hands. It was a mystery to Stanton how George Donner had won a woman like that in the first place. He assumed Donner's money had something to do with it.

"A group of us are heading out tomorrow," Bryant said, more quietly. "Why don't you join us? You're your own man, no family to worry about. That way, you could get to . . . wherever you're going that much quicker."

Bryant was obviously fishing again, trying to learn the reason why Stanton was making the trip west. Most people were only too eager to talk about it. Bryant knew Stanton had owned a dry-goods business and a home back in Springfield, but Stanton hadn't shared with him-hadn't shared with anybody-why he'd decided to walk away from it all. His partner, the one with the business sense, had died unexpectedly, leaving Stanton to manage the store on his own. He had the head for that kind of thing but not the spirit for it-waiting on the endless stream of customers, haggling with the ones who didn't like his prices, trying to stock the shelves with products that would appeal to the citizens of Springfield, neighbors he barely knew and certainly didn't understand (exotic toilet waters? bright satin ribbon?). It had been a lonely time and was certainly one of the reasons he'd left Springfield.

But not the only reason.

Stanton decided to hedge. "What would I do with my wagon and oxen? I can't just abandon them on the trail."

"You wouldn't need to. I'm sure you can find someone in the group to buy them. Or you can hire one of the drivers to see to your wagon and make sure it gets to California."

"I don't know," Stanton said. Unlike Bryant, he didn't mind traveling with families, the noise of the children, the high-pitched chatter of the women on the trail. But it was more than that.

"Give me time to think about it," he said.

At that moment, a man on horseback came galloping up, his arrival announced by a swirl of dust. George Donner. One of his jobs was to get the wagon train started on its way in the morning. Normally, he went about it cheerfully, urging the families to pack their campsites and get their oxen hitched up so the great caravan could get under way again. But this morning his expression was dark.

Stanton hailed Donner briefly. It was time to go, then, at last. "I was just about to chain up-" he began, but Donner cut him off.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B071X2K32P
Publisher ‏ : ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons (March 6, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 6, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4037 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #180,145 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #811 in Occult Horror
- #930 in Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
- #2,237 in Historical Thrillers (Books)

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4.1 5,424 ratings

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"Deeply, deeply disturbing. Hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark." -- STEPHEN KING

"Supernatural suspense at its finest" - NY Times

One of the Most Celebrated Horror Books of 2020

Oprah Magazine, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, Book Riot, the NY Times and many more

WINNER Best Novel (Translated) of 2019, Celsius 232, Spanish festival of science fiction, fantasy, and horror

Twice nominated for Stoker Award for Best Novel and Locus Magazine for Best Horror Novel

One of NPR's 100 favorite horror stories

2018's Best Books - The Observer, Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books

Winner 2019 Western Heritage Awards Outstanding Novel

One of the 21 best horror novels written by a woman - Unbound Worlds

“Katsu shows an acute understanding of human nature. … [She] is at her best when she forces her readers to stare at the almost unimaginable meeting of ordinary people and extraordinary desperation, using her sharp, haunting language.” - USA Today (3 1/2 out of 4 stars)

"[A] blockbuster.... Combines meticulous historical research and a keen understanding of human nature with a monstrous original metaphor to reimagine the ill-fated Donner Party..." - Salon

"The story she writes of human failings and despair is so powerful and so well-written... Hauntingly good." - The Times (UK)

(Starred review) “A wildly different take on the historical tragedy of the Donner Party…. For fans of historical fiction and the supernatural, Katsu’s goosebumpy and spooky plot makes for an original and surprising read.” - Library Journal

(Starred review) "Katsu injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party... Fans of Dan Simmons' The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills." - Publishers Weekly

"Like The Revenant but with an insistent supernatural whisper. The setting and the story are utterly chilling. And the telling of it is so well done."- Sarah Pinborough, author of Behind Her Eyes

“Equal parts unputdownable and must-put-it-down-or-I-am-going-to-have-a-heart-attack… You travel into this book and there is no escape. Katsu is an exceptionally gifted writer and the dread-soaked pages are with me every day as both a writer and a scaredy cat.”” – Author of YOU Caroline Kepnes on TODAY.com

“Uneasy, nauseous, slow-burning tale that marries historical fiction with a hint of the supernatural. Great detailing; colorful characterization; some supremely ominous stuff, but always reined in at the final moment to rack up the tension even more. Loved it!”- Joanne Harris,

author of Different Class and Chocolat

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of March: Atmospheric horror meets the Donner Party in Katsu's retelling of the doomed pioneers.- Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review

“The Hunger is a bold and brilliant novel, heavy with foreboding and dread, and with a rich vein of humanity at its core. I challenge you to read it without experiencing your own hunger pangs.”- Tim Lebbon, author of Relics and The Silence

"If you think the story of the Donner Party can’t get more horrific, think again. In this gripping, atmospheric reimagining of that dark tale, Katsu has created a deeply unsettling and truly terrifying masterpiece.”- Jennifer McMahon, author of Burntown and The Winter People

“The Hunger is a perfect metaphor of our times, a study in the best and the worst of human nature, our propensity to see evil in those on whom we depend, and the terror that comes when community falls apart. Beautiful, lyrical, utterly grounded in the wagons, the land, and the people, this is the best--and scariest--story I’ve read this year. Don’t start late at night and expect to sleep!”- Manda Scott, author of Hen's Teeth

"The tension is perfect: the novel is a model for how to construct the slow build... Well-written and gripping with a strong conclusion, The Hunger is an inventive take on an already morbidly fascinating historical event. Recommended!"- Historical Novels Review

“Katsu’s latest novel…grips readers from the opening paragraphs and doesn’t let go. Full of richly drawn and fascinatingly flawed characters, this is a story that is respectful of the history it relates, but doesn’t shy away from the sins, mistakes and bigotry of the past, to impressive effect.”- RT Book Reviews

"We think we know how the story will end [but it] ends with a twist that I certainly didn't see coming."- Criminal Element

Ms. Katus's debut novel, The Taker, was selected by Booklist as one of the top 10 debut novels of 2011. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Program and Brandeis University, where she studied with novelist John Irving, and an alumni of the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Like many writers, she has a day job, too: for over 30 years, she was an intelligence analyst for the federal government and RAND, and is currently a consultant on emerging technology.

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Eclectic Reader

“Evil Is Invisible, and It Is Everywhere”

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2018

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Most people recognize the name of the Donner party and know some of its horrendous, ill fortune trying to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains to get to California in an expedition during 1846-1847 via covered wagon, horseback, and on foot. Alma Katsu vividly recreates that nightmare trip in her latest novel, The Hunger (2018; 376 pp.) She reveals in the novel’s “Acknowledgements” she takes “many liberties in shaping the material for fiction” and “names, locations, and dates have remained but much else has been changed to fit the story,” but the suffering and misery of those in the party reads very true to life. More importantly, Katsu introduces a chilling and monstrous supernatural element into this very famous, historical tragedy.

It is a large group of ninety headed west “consisting mostly of the Donner and Reed families” joining up “with a much larger group led by a retired military man, William Russell, outside Independence, Missouri.” Their party is on the move later in the season than most forcing them to move with deliberation and there are problems: a barrel of flour is found “infested with weevils.” A young woman delivers a stillborn. The party is being followed by wolves. But it isn’t until they are in “mile after uninterrupted mile of buffalo grass, disrupted only by the red spire of Chimney Rock [in what later would be western Nebraska], standing like a sentry in the distance” that real trouble strikes. Yet to reach Fort Laramie [in modern day Wyoming] with the fort’s walls “at the very edge of civilization,” six-year-old William Nystrom goes missing from his tent during the night. His disappearance “spooks” the party—some of whom are already afraid of Indians; some of whom have heard stories of “spirits…[in] the forests and the hills and the rivers.” Some also know about the letters left in a cabin in Ash Hollow by other travelers one of which warns: “Turn back… Turn back or you all will die.” When the Nystrom boy is found, his body is in torn tatters.

Thus, begins an expedition into terror. With eloquent, suspenseful prose and real-to-life characters and dialogue coupled with the feel of historical and geographic intensity and realism Katsu gives her audience an unforgettable reading experience in The Hunger.

Katsu delivers strong character development in The Hunger and many of the characters come from varied backgrounds with a variety of reasons for desiring a new life in California. Through flashbacks and letters, Katsu both reveals many of the characters’ back histories while she diversifies the book’s narrative voice. Their reasons for attempting the arduous trip often comes from unfortunate decisions and actions in their lives they hope to shed. Some, however, cannot so quickly change their ways or lack the motivation to do so and bring the evil of their past lives with them on the trek west.

The pasts of many of the characters often get disclosed within the group due to gossip, pettiness, or a desire to put a person in their place. Considering the tensions already among the group trying to survive an inhospitable environment as well as something pernicious and malevolent following them, the revelations lead to mistrust, anger, resentment, discord, and division among a group of people whose best hope is to stay united. [It is while describing one violent brawl the author may make a misstep. One of the men hurls a repeated expletive at the other. Modern readers will certainly know the word, but it is a bit jarring to come across it in a novel set during 1846-7. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1905 as a derogative term for a male and cites the first use of the word in print occurring in 1913 with its modern-day meaning. Thus, it isn’t too likely the word was being commonly used nearly sixty years earlier.]

Despite an old-fashioned, almost gushy romance near the novel’s half-way point, The Hunger is a dark work befitting a tale of the Donner party with the “starvation [and] hard snows” they face which only gets bleaker with every mile the group moves forward. Fear, speculation, and paranoia grows regarding what is following the party. With no lessening of the tension and suspense to be found in the novel, readers will grasp what follows the assemblage well before the group comes to the same realization. Since members of the party become separated both physically and emotionally from each other at times, different portions of the party are made aware of the fact and fall victim to the hideous truth at different times than others. This can occasionally lead to some repetition in the novel. There are some truly frightful, gruesome scenes which accompany and lay bare the fates of a growing number of the group, but Katsu usually keeps most of the details of the creatures in the shadows as in old-fashioned horror films where the greatest impact is not to show the audience the monster until the climax of the movie, allowing the viewer to use their imagination. There is also a gnawing realization that some of the atrociousness which befalls the party is not all due to unnatural causes. Heroism and self-sacrifice shine an occasional light on events in The Hunger, but ironically, human malevolence often comes close to matching any of the terrifying preternatural wickedness that befalls the Donner party.

The dread which oozes within The Hunger may fit the definition of “literary” horror and might be seen by some readers as a gradual, slow-burn but Katsu provides enough conflict and alarming scenes along the way to keep the most impatient reader adamantly clinging to each page, their imagination and curiosity fully engaged. With its unique foundation in true events and the author’s imaginative additions and excellent storytelling, The Hunger is likely to satisfy the neediest appetite.

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B. Capossere

taught and suspenseful 4.5

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2020

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The Donner Party tragedy — a horribly-gone-wrong 1846 emigration to California that ended with half the emigrants dead and the survivors having to resort to cannibalism — would hardly seem to need a ratcheting up of the horror via the addition of the supernatural. But that’s just what Alma Katsu has done in her Locus-nominated novel The Hunger. And honestly, I’m still not sure I needed the supernatural aspect because Katsu has created an entirely compelling, immersively suspenseful account of this harrowing journey just out of the more mundane character and environment. 

The book opens with a prologue, which is really a looking ahead in time, as a rescue group sent out in April of 1847 to find the “last known survivor of the Donnor Party tragedy” arrives to find the site “eerily quiet . . . no sounds at all, no birdsong, no splash of waterfowl” and “the entire site smell [ing] of carrion. The rich stench of decaying flesh.” Approaching the lone cabin, they note “what looked like a human vertebra, cleaned of skin,” leaving only a brave few to step up before the door, which then “opened on its own,” ending the chapter.

From that cliff-hanger we jump back to Nebraska, June 1846 as Charles Stanton is shaving before the wagon train sets out for the day. But even this routine domestic act is laden with a sense of the ominous as Stanton first recalls a line of his grandfather’s — “A wicked man hides behind a beard, like Lucifer,” — and then cuts himself so that his razor “was streaked with blood” and on his neck appeared a “line of crimson . . . a gaping three-inch slash.” A minor cut, but emblematic he thinks of the entire “damnable journey in a nutshell. One unexpected ‘mishap’ after another.”

Stanton’s POV is one of several Katsu employs, the others including Edwin Bryant, a former newspaperman looking to learn about Native American folklore; Tamsen Donner, the beautiful wife of the wagon leader who is rumored to be both a temptress and a witch; Elitha Donner; Tamsen’s step-daughter; Mary Graves, a thoughtful, innocent young woman who becomes close to Stanton; and James Reed, George Donner’s rival to head the party. Nearly all of them have a secret of some sort (Elitha, for instance, has begun to hear voices in her head), each of which will eventually be revealed.

As Stanton cleans up from his shaving accident, Bryant tell him he and a few others are going to ride ahead, no longer willing to move at the train’s dangerously slow pace, especially this late in the season, and asks if Stanton wants to join them. Before he can answer though, news comes of a young boy gone missing, and soon after that the child’s body is found (“or what was left of him”), badly mutilated in a fashion Bryant (who has some medical training) says is too neat and orderly to have been done by wolves, not, he says, does it look like the work of Native Americans.

Things actually go downhill from that point on. Internal divisions, rivalries, and jealousies begin to divide the members of the party. Tempers explode raising the threat of violence and then violence itself. Food begins to run out. The weather worsens. Bad route decisions are made. Their promised guide never materializes. Accusations of all sorts start to fly. Respite stops, such as Fort Bridger, aren’t the havens that had been hoped for. And underlying all of that is the sense that something is stalking the party even as it becomes more and more isolated from the world and grows weaker and weaker. Though as is often the case in this sort of literary horror, the question becomes which is more deadly — the monsters outside or the monsters inside? Or are they possibly one and the same?

Katsu doles out omens and blows steadily and in increasingly intense form, ratcheting up the tension bit by bit: Elitha’s voice, an affair that may threaten the uneasy balance in the party, a shocking revelation inside an abandoned shack, bodies that appear to have been meant as sacrifices, a murder, an expulsion, a charge of witchcraft, an attempted rape, and eventually a drawn-out siege. Weaving in and out amongst all this is a restrained thread of the fantastical: Tamsen’s charms and herbal concoctions, Elitha’s voices, and the Indians legend of the “na-it” (the hunger) — a transformation that comes upon the stricken, “a bad spirit that can pass from man to man.” That last, which of course gives the book its title, is a wonderfully evocative concept, because while it comes from a Native American legend, Katsu makes it quite clear who that term really refers to. After all, one needn’t conjure up some sort of magical monster to find a creature that has an insatiable hunger to consume everything, wipes out all life in an area, destroys the ecosystem, feeds on its own, and is an implacably merciless, unthinking predator. That underlying symbolism throughout the novel adds a nice bit of depth to the scary story at the surface.

The unrelentingly claustrophobic tension of the wagon train’s journey is broken up by a series of letters from Bryant detailing his journey to track down a Native American legend akin to the Navajo skinwalker, as well as a series of flashbacks for the POV characters that explore their dark secrets and deepen their characters.

That characterization is sharp throughout, and it’s a testament to Katsu’s skill in both narrative plotting and characterization that we are suspended in fear and suspense even as, of course, we know what happens to these people. Despite that knowledge, one finds oneself desperately wishing for some way these people (some of them at least), can avoid their fate. As if, after hewing relatively tightly to the facts of the Donnor Party’s journey (and Katsu does an excellent job with the historical details of that odyssey—whether it be the settings, the methods, the landmarks, or other such elements), the author will simply drop the whole historical accuracy aspect and spin us off into some sort of happy or semi-happy ending. But of course, that doesn’t happen.

In fact, Katsu’s vivid recreation of the journey, her sharp characterization, her insightful plumbing of the depths of human nature (as well as, occasionally, showing us its heights), and her masterful control of tension meant that, for me at least, the supernatural elements were the least interesting aspects of the novel. I’m also, I confess, not a regular reader of horror fiction. Those coming to the book looking for a lot of the occult might find this a slow opening (I can see some fans complaining she spends “sooooo much time on the history . . . “). I, however, thought the book was mostly perfectly paced.

That only changed somewhat toward the end, when things sped up a bit and, perhaps not uncoincidentally, the monsters made their first really direct appearances and attacks. But then, things slowed again, and those events led to two great scenes at the end. While the last bit of the novel, therefore, is a bit disappointing, it’s only in comparison to what has come before, is relatively brief, and gets us in short order back to several strong moments. This was, so far, my favorite of the Locus-nominated novels I’ve read this past month.

(review originally appeared at fantasyliterature.com)

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Lionel S. Taylor

Should Have Stuck Closer To Actual Events

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2019

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The Hunger is a fictional take on actual events that took place in 1846-1847 along the Oregon Trail. Stranded in the snow with no food for several months the Donners were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. When I picked this book up I expected the cannibalism and the struggle to survive with no guarantee that there would be a rescue or that they would survive until the snow melted and be strong enough to make it help would be the main driver of the story. The details of what happened are kinda sketchy and allow plenty of room to elaborate and yet stay within the confines of what happened. This is not the route the author took. Instead, the story has a supernatural bent as something is stalking the party as it crosses the continent. As other reviewers have said there is also a romantic element to the story that I did not have a problem with but it did not seem to add to the overall plot. I would say that the story starts with a lot of promise as the story lends itself to horror since the actual events were pretty horrific in themselves. But in the second half of the book, the narrative seems to meander and wander with no real idea of where it is headed. This was a missed opportunity. Overall this is still an interesting book and if you are not familiar with the story of the Donner Party this is an entertaining story that will make you want to learn more about it. But it could have been better if it would have just stuck to the actual story a little closer.

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Piyanjali C. De Fransz

The Hunger by Alma Katsu

Reviewed in Italy on February 10, 2023

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La consegna è state puntuale come sempre. Per quanto riguarda il libro, ero solo nella storia e non riuscivo a smettere di leggere. "The Hunger" mi ha fatto venire sete di più!

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Michael W.

Spannend, fesselnd und gut geschrieben

Reviewed in Germany on September 18, 2022

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Für mich ist die Autorin eine Neuentdeckung. Absolut zu empfehlen! Geschichte eines Treks in den amerikanischen Westen, die sich aus vielen Gründen zu einer Horrorstory entwickelt.

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Cleavage2Beaver

Literally 'DEVOURED' this book in one sitting!

Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2020

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Wonderfully written, powerful and riveting, and I found myself interested the whole way through. The characters have depth, and the story, while parts are factual, and it's a fictional twist on the Donner Party story. It's an amazing read, and I would suggest if you're looking for something new, horror/suspense/drama -- this is it. It's absolutely an astounding, powerfully written story, and you can FEEL the tension as people start to turn against one another. I am a fan of this writer, and this won't be the last book I read of theirs!

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connie

Slechte kwaliteit van boek

Reviewed in the Netherlands on June 30, 2020

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Het verhaal is goed maar het boek zelf is zo slecht. Dunne grijze pagina's. Nog nooit zo een uitvoering van een boek gekocht. Zeer slecht.

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