The Hunger – A Nameless Evil Haunts the Snowbound Pioneers

“Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”

Intelligence analyst-turned-novelist Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (published March 2018) adds a supernatural horror twist to the already infamous and terrifying ‘Donner Party’ incident of 1846-47. Parallels could be drawn between Alma’s novel and Dan Simmons’ Terror which also melded historical tragedy (the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845-46) with a mysterious, otherworldly intrusion. Although shorter than Simmons’ sprawling narrative, The Hunger, similar to Terror expertly amplifies the dread infusing this terrible historical journey (by evoking the bone-chilling atmospherics of vast American prairie) rather than only striving to conceive an insipid and gory monster-thriller.

The Donner party was group of American pioneers who set out from Missouri in May 1846 to California, but an ill-advised shortcut through the mountains left them stranded in the Sierra Nevadas for close to four months (snowed in for the winter). Of the 87 members of Donner party wagon train, eventually 48 made it to California alive. It was one of the gruesome events among the white American pioneers’ westward migration. Adding more to the legend of Donner Party, apart from the real horrors of despair and deprivation, were the reports of cannibalism (although some research studies have denied this). Katsu’s novel opens with a rescue team arriving at an abandoned cabin on April 1847, the spring following the cursed winter which befell upon the Donner Party. Then the novel leaps back in time and unfolds from multiple perspectives to painstakingly detail the long wagon train journey across the picturesque, vast stretch of grasslands.

The wealthy George Donner and his extended clan are easily the most prominent of the wagon train party. The Kesebergs, the Reeds, the Graveses, the Murphys, etc are some of the other families who have hitched themselves to the wagon trail. There are also teamsters, servants, and prospecting single men making this arduous trip; all pushing forward on the dusty trail to start anew. Alma Katsu unfolds her eerie tale largely from the viewpoint of the party’s outcasts. Charlie Stanton’s unmarried status has generally stoked mistrustfulness and contributing to that feeling is the rumors about Stanton’s past. Tamsen Donner, George’s beautiful young wife, is considered to be a witch, even though she mostly tends to her children and doesn't recruits virginal girls for her coven. The unmarried 20-year-old Mary Graves is another significant character in the novel who develops a tentative romantic relationship with Stanton.

The popular but feckless George Donner loses his glow once his decision to take a shortcut goes utterly wrong. Reed who takes charge of the party after George is wildly unpopular and craftily trumped by the 'evil' Keseberg. But the palpable horror in the novel starts with a child’s disappearance, followed by the discovery of child’s cruel murder. The killing is too messy to attribute it to Native Americans or the wolves. Slowly talks of evil and infectious spirit manifolds the wagon party families’ desperation for survival. The power struggles and shifting alliances allows the inexplicable evil to grow around them. As towering mountains lay ahead, ominous things rustles in the wintry night and when food runs out, the pioneers keep on making one bad decision after another.

The Hunger, even though takes a never-jangling deviation from history to the supernatural, ultimately focuses on the contrasts of human condition: resilience and pettiness; bravery and timidity; love and hate; empathy and indifference, etc. In fact, more than the creature-thrills, Hunger is at its best when it lays out the basest elements of people and scrutinizes it with a piercing objective gaze. Evil pervades the story’s grim atmosphere, but it isn’t spelled out in a distinct manner. The characters here interminably flawed and hence the bad things they do are understandably human. Particularly, I liked the character arc of Tamsen Donner, who starts off as a bewitching adulteress but Katsu slowly peels off the labels with which she is defined to deliver three-dimensional portrait of a repressed woman. Altogether, The Hunger is a smartly embellished character-driven re-telling of a notorious historical incident.