Review by New York Times Review
THERE'S NOTHING QUITE LIKE summer to make me long for horror fiction. I can't say why, but on hot and bright afternoons, when the sky is cerulean and the air thick with the scent of cut grass, my imagination bends toward shadowy spaces. So it's no surprise that, when I'm piling up books for summer reading, my choices veer to the dark side. YOU CAN'T GET much darker than The HUNGER (Putnam, paper, $16), Alma Katsu's Bram Stoker Award-nominated novel, just out in paperback. This reimagining of the Donner party's ill-fated westward crossing is supernatural suspense at its finest. It is strangely ethereal, yet gritty, with one eye on the distant skyline and the other on the bloody journey. If historical novels are your thing, "The Hunger" delivers a believable, fully realized 19th-century America. But the best thing about "The Hunger" is that it will scare the pants off you. The basic facts of the story remain true to life: Pioneers, traveling from the Midwest to California, are delayed by infighting and incompetence and forced to spend the winter in the Sierra Nevada. Unprepared for such harsh conditions, they run out of food. Many die. Some of those who survive resort to cannibalism. The first sign of trouble occurs when a boy is dragged away in his sleep. The search party finds him the next morning, but there is "almost nothing left but the skeleton." Predictably, the local Washoe tribe gets the blame. They are not the ones responsible for the carnage, but they know what is: the "na'it," a demon whose name translates as "the hunger." The spirit's appetite is limitless. It slips into a human body, unfurls its insatiable self, and begins to feed, eating the members of the wagon train one by one. "You don't know what it's like, to be starving," the na'it says before it attacks. "The pain of it. It hollows you." Needless to say, it hollows everyone else, too. Katsu's descriptions of the demon are terrifying: "Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many - a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey." While Katsu has taken liberties with history here and there (she discusses her research methods in a note at the back of the book), the biggest change in her retelling - and what makes it possible to stomach a novel about cannibalism - is that human beings are not responsible. The na'it is the bad guy here, not us. With blame shifted to the spirit world, we're off the hook, and able to relax and enjoy the journey, one so entertaining that you almost don't mind feeling queasy at dinner. IN MELANIE Golding's debut, LITTLE DARLINGS (Crooked Lane, $26.99), Lauren - a new mother of twins - is targeted hours after delivery by a modern-day witch with "no teeth and a tongue that darted darkly between full but painfully cracked lips," who wants to exchange Lauren's babies for her own monstrous ones. Lauren's first reaction is to call social services. But the witch doesn't want a homeless shelter. She's there to make a deal. Her babies are cursed with "a dark charm" while Lauren and her family "are the lucky ones, you and yours. We had nothing, and even then we were stolen from." It is a frightening encounter, one made even more so by Lauren's postpartum injuries. Her body is raw and ripped, her mind clouded by medication and exhaustion and pain. She is "a pulsating piece of meat full of inconvenient nerve endings and uncauterized vessels... deconstructed by nature, and then by man, then nature again, and finally by man - the two forces tossing her hand over hand, back and forth like a volleyball." Golding's portrait of the female body as a reproductive spectacle - how creation tears it apart and disables it - is unforgettable. Lauren leaves the hospital with her twins but, some months later, the babies disappear. After a frantic search, they are returned possessed by the "evil babies," a change that only Lauren recognizes. With this turn of events, we are thrown into a game of shifting perspectives and unreliable narratives. Who took the twins? Are they in fact possessed? Or is Lauren suffering from postpartum fantasies, a "crazy woman" making hysterical claims? Her manipulative, gaslighting husband, Patrick, thinks she is delusional; Detective Sergeant Jo Harper, who has been put on the case, believes she's not. The reader searches for clues not to solve the crime, but to get a grasp on Lauren's mental state. The crazy unreliable female narrator is a tired device these days, one bordering on cliché, but I found Golding's portrait of new motherhood to be so spot on, so filled with the horrible and gruesome realities of childbirth, and the infantilization of women by the medical system, that I couldn't turn away. There is something of Sylvia Plath in Lauren, her voice a primal maternal shriek that rises like a spell. One suspects that the real sorceress here is Golding, whose writing has given a voice to every wronged mother. missing persons, paranoia and psychosis - this is the stuff of Brian Evenson's latest collection, song for the unraveling OF THE WORLD (Coffee House, paper, $16.95). I've long thought of Evenson as the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. I have never read a story of his that hasn't messed with me. I know what he can do, and I often expect what's coming, and yet, quick as a sucker punch, there it is: an existential crisis. It's hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently. Finishing this collection, I came to the conclusion that it's better not to fight, but to give yourself over to a mind that works in alien ways. Take "The Hole," in which a character called Klim is sent out to search for his missing captain, Rurik. "The landscape was gray, unvarying, the ground covered with a thick loam that absorbed the noise." Klim soon falls in a hole, and discovers Rurik, dead, "his body far gone, livid where it wasn't outright black and suppurating." Klim is unhurt, having had "the good fortune of being able to use Rurik to break" his fall, but finds that an alien life form inhabits Rurik's body. The "Rurik creature" wants to make a deal: Klim can move over and make room in his body for the creature, or die. Klim stalls for time, but eventually, the creature loses patience: "You will join us. Shall it be willingly or no?" Evenson has been compared to the short story writer Paul Bowles, but he's also the heir to Rod Serling, with his "Twilight Zone" variety of bizarre, yet oddly moral, storytelling. Now that the reboot has aired, maybe someone at CBS could get Evenson to write an episode or two? It would make for some truly troubling television. one of my favorite discoveries this year has been the Paperbacks From Hell reissue series from Valancourt Books, which consists of five long-out-of-print vintage horror novels selected by Grady Hendrix, author of "Paperbacks From Hell," and Will Errickson, author of "Too Much Horror Fiction." So far, two of them have come out. Gregory A. Douglas's THE NEST (Valancourt, paper, $16.99) IS a Cautionary tale of pollution and infestation. When a garbage dump on Cape Cod changes its pest control, cockroaches mutate into monstrous, flesh-eating machines. The back cover describes "The Nest" as an "animal attack" novel in the style of "Jaws," but 1 would say that it is an early example of the climate horror genre, a category of fiction that is thriving now, and will only grow more relevant in the future. the second book in the series, Elizabeth Engstrom's WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US (Valancourt, paper, $16.99), is a strange and creepy novel, part romance, part nightmare. Sixteen-year-old Sally Ann Hixson has wandered down to an old abandoned tunnel "when the doors above slammed shut, cutting off all light, and the sound of a padlock's shank driving home pierced her heart." When Sally Ann is dragged up from an old well "light as a paper bag," she finds that everything in her life has changed. The remaining three paperbacks in the series - "The Reaping," by Bernard Taylor, "The Tribe," by Bari Wood, and "The Spirit," by Thomas Page - haven't been released yet, but they are something I'm looking forward to reading this summer, especially "The Spirit," a Bigfoot novel that Grady Hendrix, in his Goodreads review, promises will have "no long boring speculative lectures on the feeding and mating habits of Bigfoot... and Bigfoot doesn't rape anyone." Sounds like my kind of Bigfoot. when my french mother-in-law came to New York this spring, I asked her to bring me the French edition of Grégoire Courtois's THE LAWS OF THE SKIES (Coach House, paper, $16.95) so that I could compare the original with Rhonda Mullins's (excellent, it turns out) translation. My belle-mere read a few chapters on the plane, and her reaction is one I will never forget: Wide-eyed, a little off balance, she gave me the book as if it were a bloody mouse pulled from a trap. That is what Courtois aims to do - shock and destabilize - and that is what he does in this slim novel about a children's camping trip gone horribly wrong. It's a hard read, both graphic and childlike at once, the tone crystalline and the characters flat as people in a fairy tale. Like "Lord of the Flies," "The Laws of the Skies" suggests that there is an inherent evil in certain children, one that emerges in nature, and that it's best to keep the kids at home lest they go wild. the "bird box" author Josh Malerman's new novel, inspection (Del Rey, $27), explores the opposite scenario: the disaster of keeping innocent children isolated in a man-made environment. Richard, known as D.A.D., and Marilyn, known as M.O.M., have embarked on an experiment in which they raise two groups of children, one male and one female, in isolation without any knowledge of each other. M.O.M. and D.A.D. took 26 boys and 26 girls as infants, gave them letters as names (A through Z), christened them the Alphabet Boys and the Letter Girls and brainwashed them into believing they had been born from "Living Trees." If any of the children discover the truth, as two boys - A and Z - did, they are killed. What could possibly be the point of this bizarre experiment? Well, Richard thinks that boys only become geniuses when undistracted by thoughts of sex and desire. He wants the boys to become "the most enlightened, undistracted minds in the history of mankind." "The opposite sex gets in the way of this happening," Richard believes. Marilyn, for her part, got into the kidnapping and brainwashing business because her married friends weren't much fun anymore. "Why," Marilyn wonders, "did it seem that everyone around her changed so much when paired with another?" "Most, if not all, had sunk below the surface of relationship mud." Aside from the nonsensical motives of these two weirdos, and the near impossibility of rounding up 52 infants to squirrel away without some major inquiry, there is a more nefarious assumption here: that all couples are male and female, and that love or desire cannot possibly occur between the same sex. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but statistically, some of those kids are going to grow up distracted. If you can get over the flawed premise, the book doesn't reward your efforts. World building goes on forever, with the details of the children's lives piling up without much dramatic thrust. Just when we start to understand the Alphabet Boys' world and are ready for something to happen, we jump over to the Letter Girls and do it all again. It's a shame, because Malerman's presence on the page is alluring, and his portraits of the children are emotionally resonant. One of the more satisfying moments of the book comes when a boy and a girl finally establish contact. "Something very important was stolen from us," J, a boy, says to K, a girl, when they meet in secret. "And you know what's worse? We didn't even know there was freedom to miss." ? takes his hand and says: "Whatever they took, let's take it back." J and K, like anyone who has been duped, are vengeful. Their resistance to being trapped in a world where the possibility of love doesn't exist is where the real story lies. But such moments are too few and far between. The kids, with all their anger, are stranded in a thought experiment. As a result, the gruesome violence at the end feels inauthentic, a blood bath masquerading as denouement. Perhaps I was disappointed because I agree with Malerman: Segregation by gender is genuinely terrifying. Only this book doesn't seem to know why. for a real-life segregated community, look no farther than FLIGHT OR FRIGHT: 17 Turbulent Tales (Scribner, paper, $17), the anthology edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent that has just been released in paperback. It features 17 short stories about "all the things that can go horribly wrong when you're suspended six miles in the air." But what has actually gone horribly wrong is the failure of these experienced editors to include even one female horror writer in their collection. The effect is a single-note book that lacks depth or complexity. While there are no female writers, plenty of women pop in for quick cameos. There is Katie, whose absence "in the kitchen or watching soaps or whatever it is she does in her free time" allows her brother Jorgensen to reveal his war stories to the son of a fellow soldier in David J. Schow's "Warbirds." There is the dull flight attendant in Richard Matheson's creepy "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" with the "blank expression" who, when asked by a panicked passenger to verify that a creature with a "hideously malignant face" is crawling on the wing of the DC-7, reacts with all the force of a blowup doll: "Red lips part as though she meant to speak but she said nothing, only placing the lips together again and swallowing." And there is the wife, mentioned in passing in Ray Bradbury's allegorical tale "The Flying Machine," whose ignorance of her husband's invention spares her life. While her secondary role is a blessing in this instance, such flat, offstage characters are boring. I would have liked to read about more interesting and complicated people - both male and female. As we saw in Malerman's book, one without the other makes for dull fiction. One of the best stories is Joe Hill's excellent "You Are Released," where the characters are as varied as those one finds on an actual flight. All kinds of people - rich and poor, liberal and conservative, famous and obscure, male and female - are traveling at 37,000 feet when there is an "incident at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam ... some kind of flash." The tension in this story rises from impending nuclear war, but also from the conflict of being trapped in a small space with other people. You like them and you hate them and you want to see what happens to them because, although they are different from you, you recognize their humanity. I can't help believing that if the collection included writers of various perspectives, it would have been as complex as Hill's imagination. That Stephen King (Hill's father) would edit such a lopsided book surprises me, as he has been so outspoken about the systematic elision of women's names. Back in February, he tweeted that his wife, Tabitha King, was "rightly pissed" that she had not been mentioned by name in the media after the Kings gave a donation to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, but had been referred to merely as "Stephen King's wife." Most women know that these fly-bys happen all the time, especially when it comes to getting credit for their contributions. But they shouldn't happen when Stephen King is in the cockpit. His defense of Tabitha King, and by extension all women who merit their names in print, showed an awareness of how hard women must struggle for recognition. When good guys like Stephen King replicate the very bias they criticize, it's clear we're in trouble. Like K, the Alphabet Girl who wanted her due, it's time to replace what's missing. Women make donations to genealogical societies. Women buy and read books. Women write horror fiction. Let's see their names. DANIELLE TRUSSONI, the author of the Angelology series of novels, co-hosts the Writerly podcast. Her new novel, "The Ancestor," will be out in 2020.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Katsu, author of the Taker trilogy, transports readers to the American West in 1846 to explore the plight of the Donner party, with a supernatural explanation at the heart of its ill-fated quest. When the party sets out for California in the summer of 1846, it's over 90 strong and excited about a newly discovered passage. There's plenty of interpersonal drama among the group. Hearty Charles Stanton is seduced by the bewitching Tamsen Donner, whose husband, George, begins as leader of the group before being supplanted by unpopular businessman James Reed, who is having a secret tryst with a surly teamster. But when a young boy disappears, and his body is discovered days later, almost wholly stripped down to the bone, the group begins to fear that something sinister is awaiting them on the trail. Their terror intensifies as they press on, and members of the party start to fall prey to a searing hunger that makes them crave human flesh. A suspenseful and imaginative take on a famous tragedy.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Katsu (The Taker) injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party. In the prologue, set in April 1847, a team of rescuers sets out to find the last survivor of the expedition, Lewis Keseberg, but they locate only his abandoned cabin. "What looked like a human vertebra, cleaned of skin" and a "scattering of teeth" lie outside in the snow. Flash back to June 1846. George Donner is leading a wagon train to California. Those headed west often leave letters under rocks in the hope that an eastbound traveler will retrieve them and take them to the nearest post office. In one place, one of Donner's teenage daughters finds hundreds of such letters, all with the ominous message: "Turn back or you will die." Then a young boy disappears and is later found savagely mutilated, as if by an animal. The members of the party come to suspect that shape-changers are responsible for the carnage, and they encounter increasing challenges to their survival. Fans of Dan Simmons's The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills. Author tour. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Katsu (The Taker; The Descent) presents a wildly different take on the historical tragedy of the Donner Party. It's June 1846, and the travelers make their way west in a wagon train, battling harsh conditions on the road. Charles Stanton, an able man but with many secrets, is determined to put the past behind him, but is almost helplessly attracted to George Donner's wife, Tamsen. She is equally fixated on Stanton, but for her, he's merely a distraction from an unhappiness she can't escape. When the train led by Donner and James Reed runs into trouble, Tamsen becomes a target of hatred among their fellow travelers owing to her mystical beliefs. Almost immediately, a strange illness falls on the party, turning people violent and animal-like in their craving for human flesh. The Donners and others realize that something of evil nature is preying on them, and that soon enough, it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves. VERDICT For fans of historical fiction and the supernatural, Katsu's goosebumpy and spooky plot makes for an original and surprising read. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]-Adriana Delgado, Palm Beach Cty. Lib., Loxahatchee, FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An inventive reimagining of a grisly chapter in American history.Westward migration, murder, sensation: the story of the Donner Party has all this, which makes it, in its way, a quintessentially American story. This imaginative retelling of the group's journey communicates the fatal naivet of people who thought they could carry their comfortable lives across deserts and mountains, as well as the particular horrors that befell the families who followed George Donner. The wide-open spaces of the West feel closed in here, as there is nothing but danger and desolation beyond the tents and fires of the wagon train. By focusing on a few figures, Katsu creates a riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances as bad fortune befalls these travelers. Not surprisingly, each of her central characters has a past that he or she is trying to escape, and these pasts are intertwined. This serves to create a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the coming tragedy isn't just an accident of bad weather and poor leadership, but a matter of fate. And this is all before the ravaged bodies start appearing.As they stumble across corpses that appear to be sacrifices, as they confront their own gruesome losses, the settlers don't know if the evil stalking them comes from within or without. Is the need for human flesh a communicable disease or a hereditary curse? Or is the wilderness filled with monsters? The tensions Katsu creates are thrilling. The final act of the novel, though, fails to deliver. There's a surfeit of back story, and confessions and revelations that should be shocking fall flat, largely because they're obvious. And, most unfortunately, the cannibalismthe thing that makes the Donner Party the Donner Party in history and popular consciousnessbecomes boring. The conflicting theories the novel puts forward collapse into confusion, and it turns out that the idea of people desperate enough to break a nearly universal taboo is more interesting than any of the exotic explanations Katsu conjures.Two-thirds of a terrific book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
