The Hunger by Alma Katsu, Part 1

This week I made Carly read The Hunger by Alma Katsu. The Hunger is a novel based on the historic, ill-fated wagon train known as The Donner Party. As this book is big and complicated, it will take us 3 parts to cover it all. We will accelerate our usual schedule and release each part on a consecutive Sunday. If you haven't read The Hunger, don't worry, we're going to go over everything including the exhausting number of characters in this book. And for the truly uninitiated, this book contains violence against women and children, animal harm, suicide and, of course, cannibalism. This novel is intended for adults and so is this podcast. Read below for the publisher's description of The Hunger.

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 90 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.