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“The wagon train had already suffered misfortune after misfortune: signs, all of them, if you knew how to interpret them. Just last week, [Tamsen Donner] opened a barrel of flour to find it infested with weevils. It had to be thrown out, of course, an expensive loss. The following night, a woman � Philippine Keseberg, young wife to one of the less savory men on the wagon train � had delivered stillborn. Tamsen grimaced, remembering how the darkness of the prairie seemed to enfold the woman’s wailing, trapping it in the air around them. Then there were wolves following them; one family lost its entire supply of dried meat, and the wolves even carried off a squealing newborn calf. And now, a boy was missing…�
- Alma Katsu, The Hunger

Alma Katsu’s The Hunger belongs to a very specific, very cool literary genre: the horror/historical fiction mashup. In this hybrid species of novel, you start with a real-life, often deadly event, and then you add supernatural elements. Done right � as in Dan Simmons’s The Terror � you can end up with something very satisfying, a book that is both ridiculous and plausible.

To succeed in this category, you have to do three things right. First, you need an appropriate setup, a historical event with just enough gaps in the record to allow for the seamless addition of monsters, witches, or ghosts. Second, the history has to be solid. The nonfiction is the foundation, and if it’s rotten, nothing else will hold. Finally, you need to get the scares right. This is rather obvious, and obviously rather hard.

In The Hunger, Katsu nails the first two elements, but fumbles the third, leaving this a title that matches my elementary school math skills: meets expectations. This is fine, of course, but I wanted much more.

***

With regard to the first element I mentioned, the premise for The Hunger is absolutely first-rate. Katsu follows the westward passage of the doomed Donner Party, famed for getting snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the winter of 1846-47, after a series of delays and misadventures on the trail. With food running low, the trapped emigrants assured themselves a footnote in history by resorting to cannibalism.

This is a perfect springboard for Katsu, because most of the fear is extant, and does not have to be dreamt-up. There is the cold, the snow, the isolation, the wild animals, the gnawing hunger, and the intergroup friction that caused a splintering into factions, including an incident of manslaughter. A weaker man � unable to resist a bad pun � might say that all the ingredients for a satisfying meal were already present. Katsu’s stroke of minor-genius was in recognizing this fact.

I only read horror during the spooky season, so I’m typically rather selective. Usually, I find myself turning to Stephen King’s back-catalogue. But when I stumbled across a book promising to take the already-extreme saga of the Donners to the next level, I snapped it up.

***

As to the historical grounding, I was also pleasantly surprised. I’ve read a lot on America’s westward expansion in general, and on the Donner Party in particular (I recommend Michael Wallis’s The Best Land Under Heaven), and Katsu gets the details right. More than that, she bakes them into the story, rather than layering them on top. The politics of a wagon train, the charlatanry of Lansford Hastings (whose “cutoff� caused the disaster), and the local landmarks and geography are all accurate.

The problem � at least for me � is in Katsu’s execution of the frights.

***

It all begins with the characters, to wit: there are too many.

Whatever else I say about The Hunger, Katsu cannot be accused of a lack of effort. She really tries to bring the members of the Donner Party to life, struggling to evoke a cross-section of men and women with varying backstories, some of them presented through flashbacks.

To that end, she tells parts of her tale from the perspectives of Tamsen Donner, who might be a witch; George Reed, a wealthy man with a huge wagon and a bigger secret; bachelor Charles Stanton, fleeing a tragic romance with a secret of his own; former newspaperman Edwin Bryant, who spends most of these proceedings away from the others; young Mary Graves, who is falling in love with Stanton because the plot demands a love story; and Lewis Keseberg, an ill-tempered and violent jerk who also � naturally � has a secret.

The sheer number of speaking roles, combined with The Hunger’s relative brevity (less than 400 pages), means that most of these people � despite Katsu’s exertions � are nothing more than names, with one or two boldly underlined traits.

The upshot is that I didn’t feel invested in anyone. Sure, I was interested in what happened � though most of their fates are preordained � but mostly on a technical level. I read through to the end because I wanted to see how the storytelling mechanics functioned, not because I actually cared about Tamsen, George, Charles, Mary, or anyone else.

Horror doesn’t really satisfy if the stakes aren’t real. Here, the stakes seemed low, because no one resembled a fully-formed human.

***

Beyond that, the pacing of The Hunger is as bad as the Donner Party’s. Not just bad, but curious. For two-thirds of its length, Katsu is slow and deliberate, raising the tension bit by bit with odd occurrences, dire portents, and scattered clues. All of this should have culminated in the snowbound winter, where cold and hunger could have been joined by Katsu’s evil menace.

Instead, the climax is both rushed and confused, packing weeks of suffering into a few sentences and expositional exchanges of dialogue. This blunts the impact of the blow, rendering the laborious buildup a wasted exercise. I have no idea why this happened, yet I feel like it was an editorial choice, not an authorial one. That is, it seems that Katsu was given strict page limits that forced her to drastically curtail the endgame.

The conclusion also suffers from a common horror mistake: over-explanation. Rather than focusing on the characters dealing with the wind, snow, lack of food, and omnipresent death, Katsu spends inordinate space telling you exactly what has been stalking the wagon train all along.

***

There is such a thing as disposable fiction, and it has its purpose. A book that serves to pass the minutes on a bus or the hours at an airport. A book that you might not remember, but that lets you momentarily forget. Many genre titles are like that, including those of the horror variety.

The Hunger is not one of those books. This is a book that strives to be more, that should have been more. Katsu had an excellent idea, and put forth a lot of work. Unfortunately, she never injects the binding agent that might have held it all together, and it ends up collapsing.