Katsu moves through the points of view of a large cast of characters, from Charles Stanton, who is haunted by a past tragedy, to Tamsen Donner, who conceals her knowledge of herbology and folk medicine lest she be accused of witchcraft, to Elitha Donner, who hears what she gradually realizes are the voices of the dead. From there, the novel backtracks almost a year, to the previous June, when the Donner party has joined the much larger Russell party and the great wagon-train is only a few days out across the plains from Springfield MO.
It’s an effective dramatization of what we already know about the narrative going in, namely, that it will end in horror. The place is desolate, the air full of the smell of blood, the muddy ground littered with pieces of human bone. A prologue, set in April of 1847, relates the efforts of a salvage party to reach the mountain lake where the majority of the settlers stopped.
Katsu’s ambition is to revisit the events of the winter of 1846-1847 through the lens of the supernatural horror novel. It has haunted American literature, sometimes obliquely, as in Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, sometimes satirically, as in Mark Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars”, and sometimes directly, as in Richard Rhodes’s The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party. It’s a nightmare complement to the plethora of triumphalist images, novels, and films celebrating the story of the men and women who won the American West – with pieces of their fellow settlers between their teeth, the Donner narrative says. In an especially stark way, it illustrates the unexpected challenges the would-be settlers would confront, and the horrific solutions to which they would be forced to resort to meet them. The narrative of the westward-bound wagon-train whose members became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains by winter snows, running out of food and turning to cannibalism of their dead to survive, is among the most notorious of the American expansion. This is the case in The Hunger, Alma Katsu’s gripping novel of the famously ill-fated Donner party. At its best, a historical novel can impart a vivid immediacy to past events, making them live in the reader’s mind, allowing her to draw near to them. If historical fiction has the advantage of using its freedom of invention to achieve the same effect, it has the added challenge of making its innovations square with events as they have been recorded officially. Nowhere is this more true than in books addressing themselves to famous subjects, which must make a greater effort to earn space on bookshelves already crowded. The Hunger, Alma Katsu ( Putnam 978-0735212510, $27.00, 384pp, hc) March 2018.Įvery history is to some extent a secret history, offering new information on its subject, or, barring that, a fresh perspective, which may yield similar results.
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