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The Hunger, by Alma Katsu, is a retelling of the Donner Party’s story that blends the genres of horror and historical fiction.

What I liked:

• Katsu knows how to hook a reader. The short chapters and unrelenting pace of The Hunger, as well as Katsu’s ability to weave compelling, character-driven plots with relatively few words, made this book a quick read even for me.
• I suppose I’m accustomed to reading books with a few, very obviously identified MCs, so Katsu’s narrative structure kept me guessing about whose story to follow or be most invested in, and whose story might function as background. I believe Stanton and Tamsen ended up with the most screen time, so to speak, but considering neither of them survive, I wonder if Katsu intended the reader’s attention to focus elsewhere. I also do not read very much horror, so it could very well be a genre trope for the MC to perish before the end. In the context of historical fiction, I appreciated the multiple perspectives because they serve as a stark reminder of the actual humans, the individuals at the heart of the Donner Party tragedy, and may even represent a broader commentary on how we remember and (re)tell history today.

What I learned:

• I did not know there were indigenous people traveling with the Donner Party. In the author’s note at the end, Katsu indicates Thomas is a fictional character based on a historical figure, Jean Baptiste Trudeau. I find it interesting that, in this story, the hunger sickness originates with white men, specifically men who journeyed from Europe to North America, and that it is a white male character who comes to this realization. Even more interesting, I did not read Bryant’s epiphany as any sort of redemption arc for him or any of the other white settlers. Thomas is very obviously murdered because of the racism of white men, racism that is clearly depicted on the page at many other points in the story. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that many of the white characters harbor dangerous, even criminal, secrets. Although the tone of the story does not strike me as anti-white, I appreciate that Katsu depicts white settlers, or “pioneers” – figures often glorified in white-written history textbooks as intrepid adventurers battling the ‘frightening’ (read: unfamiliar and populated by indigenous people) wilderness – in an altogether different light, reminding readers that, in addition to their explicit role in settler colonialism, many so-called pioneers lived lives far more questionable than their romanticized portrayals.

Questions I had:

• I remember learning about the Donner Party in school, but I don’t recall the details with sufficient clarity to know how much Katsu deviated from the historical narrative. That said, reading The Hunger made me consider the meaning of this type of fiction. What do readers gain, or what do authors hope their readers gain, from these retellings? Obviously, some retellings are sensationalized purely for entertainment, but I get the sense others, including The Hunger, are written with a more complex purpose in mind. At a time when rising nikkei authors are writing more books about JA incarceration, I wonder how these questions apply to retellings of our (nikkei) community histories as well. There are also a number of nikkei writers currently publishing work on the intersections of memory, family, and history, and I have even seen several works that seem to directly address how we might (re)contextualize JA incarceration stories through this lens.
• Historians, too, are storytellers, with particular perspectives and biases like any other writer, even if academia would sometimes encourage us to think otherwise. What is the line between history writing and historical fiction? (And I do not mean in a meta sense, as yes, today’s historical fiction may one day act as some future literary historian’s primary source.) What about the possibilities of a third space, if, for example, we define “history writing” as writing undertaken with the goal of recording “reality” as closely as it can be determined and “historical fiction” as writing undertaken with the goal of fictionalizing “reality” while retaining sufficient references for the reader to recognize the source material? In this situation, I conceptualize a third space as being writing undertaken with the goal of constructing a narrative, perhaps to fill a gap in the so-called historical record, while simultaneously recognizing that the writer will be utilizing their personal connection to the narrative to connect the dots in the absence of primary sources or other verifiable reference points. The resulting work will be a unique act of storytelling that helps structure or illuminate a broader narrative for the community while unambiguously asserting itself as the individual expression of the creator. I know works like this already exist, but I’m curious about how we might name and understand them specifically within the context of our (nikkei) community histories.
• Did Katsu envision a particular audience for this book? How have indigenous readers responded to this book? How do they feel about the portrayal of the indigenous characters?

Follow-up:

• I’ve already ordered another of Katsu’s books – I hope it will be as gripping as this one! I’m also waiting for Katsu’s recent release, The Fervor, to go into paperback.