The Hunger

January 1, 2018

Katsu (The Taker; The Descent) presents a wildly different take on the historical tragedy of the Donner Party. It's June 1846, and the travelers make their way west in a wagon train, battling harsh conditions on the road. Charles Stanton, an able man but with many secrets, is determined to put the past behind him, but is almost helplessly attracted to George Donner's wife, Tamsen. She is equally fixated on Stanton, but for her, he's merely a distraction from an unhappiness she can't escape. When the train led by Donner and James Reed runs into trouble, Tamsen becomes a target of hatred among their fellow travelers owing to her mystical beliefs. Almost immediately, a strange illness falls on the party, turning people violent and animal-like in their craving for human flesh. The Donners and others realize that something of evil nature is preying on them, and that soon enough, it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves. VERDICT For fans of historical fiction and the supernatural, Katsu's goosebumpy and spooky plot makes for an original and surprising read. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]--Adriana Delgado, Palm Beach Cty. Lib., Loxahatchee, FL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2018
Katsu (The Taker) injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party. In the prologue, set in April 1847, a team of rescuers sets out to find the last survivor of the expedition, Lewis Keseberg, but they locate only his abandoned cabin. “What looked like a human vertebra, cleaned of skin” and a “scattering of teeth” lie outside in the snow. Flash back to June 1846. George Donner is leading a wagon train to California. Those headed west often leave letters under rocks in the hope that an eastbound traveler will retrieve them and take them to the nearest post office. In one place, one of Donner’s teenage daughters finds hundreds of such letters, all with the ominous message: “Turn back or you will die.” Then a young boy disappears and is later found savagely mutilated, as if by an animal. 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. Author tour. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management.

January 1, 2018
An inventive reimagining of a grisly chapter in American history.Westward migration, murder, sensation: the story of the Donner Party has all this, which makes it, in its way, a quintessentially American story. This imaginative retelling of the group's journey communicates the fatal naivete of people who thought they could carry their comfortable lives across deserts and mountains, as well as the particular horrors that befell the families who followed George Donner. The wide-open spaces of the West feel closed in here, as there is nothing but danger and desolation beyond the tents and fires of the wagon train. By focusing on a few figures, Katsu creates a riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances as bad fortune befalls these travelers. Not surprisingly, each of her central characters has a past that he or she is trying to escape, and these pasts are intertwined. This serves to create a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the coming tragedy isn't just an accident of bad weather and poor leadership, but a matter of fate. And this is all before the ravaged bodies start appearing....As they stumble across corpses that appear to be sacrifices, as they confront their own gruesome losses, the settlers don't know if the evil stalking them comes from within or without. Is the need for human flesh a communicable disease or a hereditary curse? Or is the wilderness filled with monsters? 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.

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February 1, 2018
Katsu, author of the Taker trilogy, transports readers to the American West in 1846 to explore the plight of the Donner party, with a supernatural explanation at the heart of its ill-fated quest. When the party sets out for California in the summer of 1846, it's over 90 strong and excited about a newly discovered passage. There's plenty of interpersonal drama among the group. Hearty Charles Stanton is seduced by the bewitching Tamsen Donner, whose husband, George, begins as leader of the group before being supplanted by unpopular businessman James Reed, who is having a secret tryst with a surly teamster. But when a young boy disappears, and his body is discovered days later, almost wholly stripped down to the bone, the group begins to fear that something sinister is awaiting them on the trail. Their terror intensifies as they press on, and members of the party start to fall prey to a searing hunger that makes them crave human flesh. A suspenseful and imaginative take on a famous tragedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)