Known for flavoring her literary page-turners with the supernatural, in this novel she 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 ... The Hunger exposes our innate and seemingly limitless capacity for violence as a thing Americans literally spread across the country, a rotten Manifest Destiny of the soul. It's somewhat heartening that Katsu, through a wildly different kind of story, draws a similar conclusion to Clement: maybe it’s not an unshakable curse. Maybe we can find a way to survive ourselves.
Instead of sapping the story of suspense, this familiarity infuses every page with dread. And that’s before Katsu adds in a supernatural twist ... The Hunger, for all its wickedness, is somehow less of a nightmare than the actual Donner Party history, some of the darkness pushed onto external threats, or disproportionately contained in one sociopathic villain. Katsu 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.
Doubtless the historical persons would be horrified by how Katsu has characterized them here ... The isolation is anxiety-inducing and the tension is perfect: this novel is a model for how to construct the slow-build. Given the plotting, there is less gore than might be expected, but that makes this novel no less terrifying. Well-written and gripping with a strong conclusion, The Hunger is an inventive take on an already morbidly fascinating historical event. Recommended.
With The Hunger, Katsu turns her talents to tackle one of the more harrowing stories of the American pioneers, The Donner Party ... The Hunger provides us a chilling, albeit twisted, historical view of what could have actually happened; a 'what-if' that aims to terrify as well as inform.
The Hunger by Alma Katsu is a tense and gripping reimagining of one of America's most fascinating historical moments, the Donner Party, with a supernatural twist ... Katsu’s plot really does not stray from the facts as we know them about the Donner Party and their eventual fate. And though we only have glimpses of the things in the shadows, it’s only in knowing they are there, hungry and waiting, that imbues the story with a fear that just never lets up.
In Alma Katsu’s The Hunger,... a hint of the supernatural is added to the proceedings to create an absorbing, menacing thriller that had me digging into the history behind this tale as soon as I’d read the last page ... Her descriptions of the land are movingly beautiful, but there is danger even here, as we learn that a child has vanished.
Katsu injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party ... The members of the party come to suspect that shape-changers are responsible for the carnage, and they encounter increasing challenges to their survival. Fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills.
An inventive reimagining of a grisly chapter in American history ... The tensions Katsu creates are thrilling. The final act of the novel, though, fails to deliver. There’s a surfeit of back story, and confessions and revelations that should be shocking fall flat, largely because they’re obvious. And, most unfortunately, the cannibalism—the thing that makes the Donner Party the Donner Party in history and popular consciousness—becomes boring. The conflicting theories the novel puts forward collapse into confusion, and it turns out that the idea of people desperate enough to break a nearly universal taboo is more interesting than any of the exotic explanations Katsu conjures. Two-thirds of a terrific book.
