THE HUNGER (2018): A NOVEL BY ALMA KATSU.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY.
PUBLISHED BY BANTAM PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
‘Turn back or you will all die….’
There have been famines throughout history, some more famous- or infamous- than others. The Great Famine in Ireland, from 1845 to 1852, caused the deaths of one million people and the emigration of a further one million. People were turned away from the workhouses because there simply wasn’t enough room to house them or the food with which to feed them. Imagine being turned away from the workhouse! Lean times indeed.
Thousands of prisoners died horribly from starvation in the Nazi concentration camps from 1939 to 1945. The camps, scattered across Germany and Poland, were so nightmarish that the American, English and Russian troops that liberated them never forgot the horrors they saw there, and that, of course, goes double or even treble for the survivors who actually lived through them.
There was also the terrible incident in 1972, in which a rugby team and some of their families and friends crashed while flying over the Andes Mountains. Several crew members and passengers died straightaway, and the remaining survivors spent two months alone on that bitterly cold mountain from October to December. They battled adverse winter weather, an avalanche that killed off more of their already depleted numbers, and, worst of all, starvation that led to the cannibalising of the dead…
In the present day, Yemen is experiencing food shortages that have been on-going since the start of their Civil War in late 2014. Even in the so-called First World, people in countries like Ireland and England are in the kind of dire financial situations where they have to choose between ‘heating or eating,’ as it’s dubbed in the media. Few countries are total strangers to food poverty.
The food poverty situation that is really attracting me to it at the moment is the subject of Alma Katsu’s fantastic book, THE HUNGER. It’s the fascinatingly gruesome story of the Donner Party, pioneers of the Old American West, who fell into unimaginably dire straits as they attempted to travel to California from Springfield, Illinois, in 1847.
The wealthy Donner and Reed families departed Independence, Missouri in the spring of 1846, in a wagon train consisting of five hundred covered wagons. Their destination was California, thousands of miles away, where they hoped to settle for the final time.
Resettlement to California was the name of the game in the 1840s, with many Americans wanting to avail themselves of the blossoming economic opportunities in the West. Also, the belief that white Americans should settle on that part of North America, often at the expense of the Indians who already lived there, was prevalent at the time.
The ninety or so men, women and children that comprised the Donner-Reed Party might have been fine if they’d stayed with the herd, so to speak. But brothers George and Jacob Donner were very taken by an adventurer called Lansford Hastings, who was then advocating a supposedly shorter, more direct route to California, across the Great Basin rather than through Idaho’s Snake River Plain. The Party opted for the Hasting’s Cut-Off…
That was the rock they perished on. The entire party got stuck at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains for the whole of the winter of 1846-7. They’d tried to outrun the winter snows but Mother Nature pipped them to the post, covering the mountains with the thickest snows and rendering them impassable till spring. Their food ran out, of course, and they very reluctantly had to resort to… you guessed it, cannibalism.
I’m over-simplifying things greatly, of course. A myriad of other horrible, painful and uncomfortable things happened to the intrepid pioneers before they even reached the Sierra Nevada mountains. Many people died en route from different ailments and conditions like consumption, before starvation was ever a real issue.
While I feel desperately sorry for the people who were so hungry that they had to cut up and eat the bodies of their dead friends, I didn’t like the way that the Donner-Reed wagon train left some old, sick people literally by the side of the road to die alone because they’d become liabilities. No good karma could ever come out of treating your fellow man like that…
Alma Katsu’s book adds a supernatural element to an already gruesome story. She has children disappearing along the route, as fiendish, skeletally-thin humanoid figures stalk the wagon train through the trees in order to pick off the weakest and most vulnerable members when no-one is looking.
The children’s bodies turn up, but with every ounce of edible flesh skinned off them. Grim, huh? I felt that the demons were a metaphor for the encroaching hunger that intends to sweep all before it before long, but the demons sure are terrifying whether you believe they’re real or not.
The book also sexes up the plot by turning George Donner’s hot younger wife Tamsen Donner into a sexy sorceress, who bewitches men with her looks and witchy herbal trickery. She seduces the handsome Charles Stanton, who has no problem at all with being seduced.
He is tormented by the ghost of a lost love, however, and Tamsen may have some competition in the healing-poor-dear-Charles’s-broken-heart stakes. Mary Graves, daughter of Franklin, is patiently waiting in the wings to nurse him to her fragrant bosom. Do they have a happy ending, Charles and Mary? Sadly, I cannae tell ye, readers. It’s against the Reviewers’ Code, lol.
The book kind of turns German immigrant Lewis Keseberg into a sex offender. He takes the little girls into the woods and tells them that, if they don’t submit to his sexual advances, he’ll choose them as the human sacrifice required to feed the starving wagon train.
I don’t suppose too many people will shed tears over the portrayal of Lewis Keseberg as a bit of a scumbag. He was one of the survivors of the Donner Party disaster, and he was generally reviled as a man-eater and ghoul, as he openly talked about nom-nom-nomming on human flesh. The funny thing is that he opened a restaurant in later life, but I couldn’t comment as to the provenance of the beef, heh-heh-heh…
Anyway, do read this book if you have any interest in the grisly side of history, which I have in spades. YouTube is jam-packed with excellent films and documentaries on the subject of the Donner-Reed party, which I’ve been watching avidly all week.
The prologue to the book, just two-and-a-bit little pages, scared me almost out of my wits. Do you want to be scared too, reader? Do you want to be so scared you can’t trust yourself to go to sleep until the first rays of dawn lighten the gloom in your bed-chamber because you don’t know what might be lurking in the shadows…? Just pick up this book…
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