The Hunger - Alma Katsu

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on a tv show called Yellowjackets. It follows a highschool girls football team after their plane to the national championships crashes in the Canadian Rockies. Stranded in the wildnerness for month on end, they slowly start to lose their minds, and things start to get distinctly cannibalistic. Not only was it absolutely fantastic (I highly recocomend it), it put me right in the mood for some tasty survival based horror. Lucky for me, there was the perfect book in my TBR pile - The Hunger by Alma Katsu. I read Desperate Passage, a non-fictional account of the Donner Party a while back and it was absolutely horrifying, so I was interested to see how a fictionalised version would flesh it out.

1846. On the long road west to California, the Donner party faces a difficult choice. Already plagued by late starts, delays and problems, they are far behind schedule and are desperate to make it across the mountains before the winter hits. Torn between the safer but longer established route and an untested but potentially shorter route through the wilderness, the party of pioneers push for speed, and push themselves to the brink of madness. As the path disappears, arguments turn violent, supplies run out, and illness plagues the group. When children start to disappear, the party begin to suspect that there is something far more threatening and deadly out in the trees than just the natural elements...

The basic facts of the Donner Party story are all here. Starting weeks after they should have for the 2500 mile trip to California, the party of almost 90 people opted to take an untested "short cut" that had disastrous consequences. Time lost on the cut-off left them stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains when the winter snows hit. 42 people perished in one of the coldest winters on record, from starvation, disease or, when things got really desperate... cannibalism. The true events were dark, horrific and terrifying in their own right. So my question to Katsu is, why make it worse?

Did we really need clumsy wendigo type zombie plot to explain away the cannibalism, and manufactured angst filled backstories? The actual true events as they stand would have made a perfectly decent horror story. A desperate move west, trusting a charlatan on an untested path and the slow, creeping realisation that they're stranded, overwintering in the mountains with nothing to eat. Cannibalism. Actual, true life, no choice (for the most part) cannibalism. That's pretty horrifying. Adding a supernatural element cheapens it somehow. If you wanted to write a rabid, zombie plagued account of a pioneer party, why not make it completely fictional one, with your own characters?

In this case, using an already existing cast of characters hasn't worked out in the book's favour. We might know it as the Donner Party, but there were more than just the Donner family venturing down the untested Hastings cut-off. As I previously mentioned, there were around 90 people in the wagon train heading west, and trying to cram even half that many people into a fictionalised account is confusing and means there is little time to get to know any of the characters properly. Characters are mentioned once then never again, and even in the last couple of chapters, people we've never come across before have their names dropped, which is disorienting and makes the story feel disjointed. A lot of the time spent getting to know the characters centres around romance. I have no interest in romance in this situation. Here I am, sitting like a lemon, waiting for people to start eating each other and all they're doing is falling in love all over the place. If I wanted historical romance, I'd read a historical romance. But I don't and I won't so why is it clogging up my horror?

It's a slow burn of a book - which, to be fair, is just like the true story. You don't get much slower than walking 2500 miles across North America I guess, but the ending feels completely rushed. Sometimes a change in pace for a book finale can work really well, but because this needs to adhere to a set timeline, it feels like the last couple of months of the expedition, and all the events involved are just crammed in to the last 50 pages. One character who gets exiled half way through and basically forgotten about, is thrown back in at the end, like: "Oh by the way that guy we exiled made it through the mountains and went and fought in a war for a bit" . For a book based on a true story that is literally famous because of cannibalism, the cannibalism also feels pretty rushed over. Having an external force drive the cannibalism also removes a lot of the drama and conflict of having to eat acquaintances, friends or even family members in order to survive.

Save your time and save your money. If you're interested in the Donner Party and learning more about their nightmare story (and it was indeed a nightmare, even without zombies), you're better off reading the excellent non-fiction accounts out there - Desperate Passage by Ethan Rarick, or The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown.