The Hunger

By: Alma Katsu

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter

"Supernatural suspense at its finest...The best thing about The Hunger is that it will scare the pants off you."--The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark."--Stephen King

A tense and gripping reimagining of one of America's most fascinating historical moments: the Donner Party with a supernatural twist.

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.

As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

Effortlessly combining the supernatural and the historical, The Hunger is an eerie, thrilling look at the volatility of human nature, pushed to its breaking point.

The Donner Party was already pretty terrifying

Mild spoilers if you don't know anything about the Donner Party. I won't ruin this book but it is true to who survived.

I'm sort of a Donner Party fan, having read The Indifferent Stars Above (excellent, btw) and listened to some podcasts, in particular the Last Podcast on the Left's deep dive. This book shapes some narratives around the party members, giving them romance story lines, backstories, etc. It was a very slow burn culminating in some genuinely scary scenes, and humanized a lot of what happened to them. Some characters in particular met some truly sad and excruciating ends. My issue is that the Donner Party is terror without any extra dressing needed. The actual party met the fate they did because of fractured leadership and the sunk cost fallacy, and they literally ate each other to survive. Layering a monster in there is almost...making excuses? There must have been some madness! There was madness. It was just the garden variety human kind.

A great twist on the Donner Party

I very much enjoyed this book. A good western story, mixed in with some horror elements. Enjoy!

An unfinished thought.

Really disappointing and rushed ending. Felt like there were more than a few chapters missing. The build up was so great for such a flat payoff.

wonderful

I truly enjoyed this book. I wasn't sure what to expect from it with it being a true story. I was hoping for really scary, and I didn't get that BUT I was not disappointed at all. I looked forward to having time to listen to the fateful events of the Donner party. I really liked the spooky twist the author put on a real story.

An Unsettling Tale With a Hunger That Creeps

This book was slow to start at first, but eventually blossomed into a gripping story I simply couldn't stop listening to. The narrator does an excellent job at capturing the voices of each character, and there's quite a lot of them. I enjoyed the various relationships between family members and wagon train members, and their descent into panic and madness was quite effectively frightening. Overall, great book enhanced by a great narrator.