Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - The Hunger

I love the Donner Party incident, and I love a good historical horror, so I had high hopes for this book. And unfortunately, I was let down. I will admit, the horror element of this book is intriguing, if a bit under-developed, and the inclusion of so many key players in the actual Donner Party was refreshing. However, there were so many things happening - so many secrets and so much interpersonal conflict - that the melodrama of it all actually eclipsed the horror. The plot crawls forward; any tension built up for the horror is immediately dissipated by the many strangely-placed interludes and frequent perspective changes. It's a little jarring and more than a little disjointed.

It's a fine enough choice if you want a spooky Donner Party fiction novel (copious historical inaccuracies aside), but if you're looking for something true to history, or something genuinely thrilling, I'd skip this one.

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cvab's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

While a bit slow to get into (things started to amp up about 100 pages in), this was a very fun read. I'm not usually one for historical texts, but I can tell the author put a lot of care and passion into research for this novel. Piecing the story together through various characters' accounts made me feel as though I was a part of the wagon train myself, trying to figure out what was going on. The "big bad" is a very interesting premise, but I don't dare say more for fear of spoiling things. Great read!

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ehmannky's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

A creepy re-imagining of the Donner's Party slow and disastrous trek to California--the genre of "we are living through a terrible event in human history and there are also The Horrors trying to kill us too" remains undefeated. The book bounces back between the trek west and the constant problems that the party had and brief glimpses into the backstories of the POV characters. The weight of their secrets and sins slowly weigh them down as they get closer to Truckee Lake, even as they are hunted by horrid creatures consumed by their own hunger. I liked the way the creatures (which resemble a mix between werewolf and wendigo mythologies) come through as representations of the weight of these sins (which are mostly sins due to the constraints of the white "civilization" they're leaving behind), the violence inherent in the expansion west, and then the terror of experiencing nature in all its violence. Katsu does play a little fast and loose with history here, which is something she openly admits at the end in order to make a better story.

I also really liked the juxtaposition of the Donner-Reed party with the glimpses of Native people that we see. I felt like the emphasis on how the white settlers hoarded their food, refused to cooperate even as everyone was literally starving, and just the general violence they turn to as a first resort was just a contrast to the emphasis on sharing food even with strangers. Even the tribe that does fall prey to the hunger creatures in the woods is that way because, as the text says, they were infected by this culture of individualism that comes from Europe in the form of a prospector.

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nnelsonaut's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Not for the faint of heart, but a fascinating and imaginative retelling of the Donner Party. If you know that history, you'll *technically* know how it ends, but the way Katsu gets there, her answer to "how?" is quite compelling and twisty. And suitably horrific. She's a marvellous writer.

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