🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "The Hunger" by Alma Katsu
This book was a horror novel based on the Donner Party, a train of migrants that left Kansas late (too late) in 1846, heading for California. they became trapped in the mountains by the snow and resorted to cannibalism to survive.
This book depicts the party also being stalked by monsters who are comparable to skinwalkers or werewolves, but are mainly left unclassified. They resemble animalistic, decaying humans with a predatory appearance. Though these are first encountered in the context of their bedevilment of a Native American tribe, the source is eventually traced back to Europeans, specifically the family of one of the travelers.
Most of the characters are versions of the real people who made up the Donner Party, namely Tamsen Donner, aloof wife of nominal leader George Donner and woman feared because of a reputation as a witch; Charles Stanton, square-jawed drifter looking to escape his past; Elitha Donner, who hears the whispers of dead people; James Reed, wealthy merchant and actually-competent leader given a gay backstory; and Edwin Bryant, journalist seeking to write about the spiritual beliefs of the Native Americans.
The book goes well for its early and middle acts, as foreboding about the new route that the caravan has chosen grows, members (especially children) die or disappear, and tensions mount between the members. Part of this comes from watching the party waste food, knowing that they will eventually starve. In the last 100 or so pages of the book, they reach the camp in the mountains near Truckee Lake. In real life, this is where much of the gristly action happened as the party was stranded for the winter. The book does save its twist and denouement for here, but I feel that the narrative is just coasting by this point. It is revealed that the threatening, murdering, rapist character, whom we know to be infected by the same desire for human flesh as the monsters trailing the party, is keeping his monsterhood in check, and is using the human flesh of deceased members to feed the others. I could easily see this as a very gritty, grimdark antihero narrative, but it is instead given very little attention on the page, as the fates of other characters are checked off the list. Other narrative threads have been lost by this point, such as Elisha's spirit eavesdropping or the aforementioned Native American tribe. Even though some characters died, including in gruesome or even upsetting ways, the one character, Edwin Bryant, who was off on his own learning the important backstory revelations did not meet the end I feared for him. In fact, in real life he went on to be a famous author and an appointed Alcade (mayor/judge) of San Francisco.
This book reminded me a fair amount of The Terror by Dan Simmons, a book I read as a teenager (predating my committed horror interest). That is another historical tale of an expedition being picked off by an incomprehensible threat, as its unity unravels, supplies run out, and members turn on each other. It is based on the Franklin Expedition, two British ships trapped in the Canadian Arctic in, similarly, the late 1840s. I tried to reread that book more recently, but didn't get far into it because of the clunky prose that I was apparently better able to read over when I was a teenager.
In some ways, The Hunger is pulled in too many directions; I was afraid for Elisha and some of the other children when the bad guy's gang of thugs came to run the camp, but this is the last segment of that viewpoint we get until the aforementioned cannibalism reveal. This definitely slows down the pacing, as do jumps ahead in time where built-up tension is allowed to dissipate. The book might have benefited from being longer, and drawing out some of the agony of the winter more. There were some real-life elements and episodes of the story that could have been milked to a greater extent, or are even excluded entirely. Maybe I’m just nitpicking, though; I was engrossed in the story, and didn’t let myself reread the Donner Party page on Wiki until I had concluded.
Did It Scare Me?
The middle section brought a lot of the foreboding I liked, especially as Stanton, one of the main characters (the most rugged) runs ahead and meets another wagon train carrying Lansford Hastings, the trailblazer of the Hastings Cutoff, the route that the Donner Party is following. He is slowly going mad in this other wagon train, under siege and cutting its way through a dense and inhospitable forest. This has a very nice Last Chance To Escape vibe; but I feel that the horror doesn't really connect when the monsters move from a theoretical presence to a real one. They are threatening enough, and harmful enough to their victims, but they spend more time skulking around than attacking.