The Hunger

"Even Addie?" Patty Reed asked, holding her doll up for her father to see. It was a rag doll with a bisque head, dressed in fabric scraps and a bit of lace tied around its waist as a sash. The doll might only weigh ounces, but ounces added up. Eight ounces of cornmeal versus eight ounces of calico snippets and bisque. Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

"I'm afraid so," Reed told her. He was surprised to feel a sudden tightness in his chest, watching his child place her doll in the dirt, carefully, as if it were a true burial. The transfer was done in an hour. Already the wagons to be abandoned were no more than ghosts. Reed shot the remaining oxen in the head so they wouldn't suffer any further, and he imagined, though he was not fanciful, that he saw in their eyes a final flicker of relief.

Bruh, these people were going through it. Between the plains with no game to hunt, the desert with no cover from sandstorms and the mountains with no end to the snow, I didn't find myself envying anyone in this story. All I could do was mutter, "man, sucks for them" and try to get more cozy on my couch.

At it's core this story is basically a small-town drama, with the unique difference that there's no physical "town". You have this huge party of 90 pioneers (at least at the beginning) and all of the inter-personal and inter-familial dynamics that comes with that. But everyone's also on the move heading west before winter, and each chapter more or less took place in a new setting with the same people, which I found to be an interesting concept. I'd don't know how you'd replicate that premise outside of an Oregon Trail-type setting like this.

I had to keep setting this book down for a few days at a time more so because of real-world reasons than a lack of interest, but that made it difficult to jump back in sometimes because I couldn't remember who was who. Which was a problem because there are a lot of named characters in this book, and new ones continue to be introduced right up to the end. About halfway through I finally started setting imaginary faces to names to keep track of everyone, but beware that this is a pretty large cast. I just double checked and there are nine different points of view that get juggled around these chapters.

That said, they all started to feel distinct and separate from each other the more time I spend with them, and it was interesting seeing the myriad of reasons someone would choose to attempt a life-threatening journey across a continent in search of a better life. There's a healthy-sized explainer at the end of the book detailing the research the author did into the Donner Party expedition and was surprised to see that only two characters were fabricated for the story; everyone else were real people that actually went on this unfortunate journey in 1846.

There was a good amount of violence in this book, the vast majority of it born out of mob mentality and stress caused by dwindling supplies. There was a supernatural element playing in the background that I wish was given more prominence than it was, but this was still a satisfying read. The prose flowed easily and conversations were easy to follow even when there were several people involved. The ending also had me saying, "holy shit" out loud, which is not a reaction most books can get out of me.

If nothing else, I was always going to enjoy a book where the (completely erroneous and missing the point) takeaway was: if everyone had just listened to the gay guy, none of this would have happened!

In 1846 a group of American pioneers set out towards a new life in California. They were to be known as the Donner party, and beset by problems, just over half of them made it. Based on this true story, The Hunger adds a supernatural element to explain why they did what they did.

I hadn't heard about the Donner party before picking up this book but it sounds a fascinating tale of survival even without adding the supernatural which I'm not sure contributed much extra. 87 left Independence, Missouri and only 48 survived; disease, exposure, injury and starvation taking its toll.

I'm not averse to historical fiction that inserts something other to explain things that we hope humans wouldn't do, but I don't think this is a good example. When a boy goes missing, he is found butchered and at first they blame the natives. Then some members of the party start worrying they are being followed by a monster, whether human or something else.

The group contains clashing personalities, there's plenty of blame assigned and infighting. There's plenty of nasty characters. As more and more things go wrong, they fall further behind schedule, meaning they will not be able to cross the mountains before winter. It would be easy to see why they might turn on one another and the party splits up.

The book dwells quite a bit on certain pioneers' past, maybe to question why people would leave their lives behind or maybe Alma Katsu just had a lot of research on these people and wanted to insert it. There's a love triangle set up in order to foster jealousy and then it doesn't really go anywhere. Tamsen's referred to as a witch and then there's not the expected witch hunt to follow.

I do not know whether it was just the bland audiobook narration but I just found it lacking atmosphere. Even a routine crossing across America would be full of risk. Sleeping out so exposed in the wilderness with safety hundreds of miles away should be a scary prospect in itself, especially in the 19th century. The harshness of the winter wasn't really conveyed and I honestly didn't care if the characters died.

If you still think you want to read this and know zero about what the Donner party did, stop reading now because I want to talk a little of how it plays out.

The party is well known because they resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. In this version of events, there is this whole set up that there is something out there infecting people and making them crave flesh, maybe zombies, maybe a rabies like disease. For the whole book you think this is what they are going to use to explain why they ate people. Yet no, last minute it turns out they just had to start eating human meat because they had no other food, which was the truth. What was the point in the supernatural bit at all?

Listening Notes
Kirsten Potter didn't suit the book at all. She sounded like she was reading a dry history book but with the occasional odd emphasis and I zoned out repeatedly. Like I'm not sure if they kept to the original deaths or if I missed the passing of an important character. I've read the timeline and it seems to have been the one thing kept faithful so, yeah, I don't think I was engaged with much of it. I'm not in a position to judge what the pioneers would have talked like but she came across as a very modern voice. I'm not sure I'd listen to more narrated by her.