Reading Wednesday
Oct. 16th, 2019 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhThe Hunger by Alma Katsu. A horror novel that reimagines the Donner Party by adding monsters to the real difficulties of starvation, cannibalism, and bad weather. An excellent premise!
Unfortunately the execution is not as good. The Hunger has gotten a ton of good press and even been nominated for several awards since it came out last year, and I really can't imagine why. The writing is flat, the characters are a collection of historical fiction cliches (the sexy bad girl, the naive good girl, the honorable man who is unfairly judged by others, the closeted gay man who's obsessed with sin), the themes could have been interesting but Katsu doesn't quite manage to bring them full circle, and it's not even that scary.
The vast, vast majority of the book concerns the party's progress along the trail before getting to its infamous winter camp snowed in up in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Which is fair enough, I suppose: plenty went wrong beforehand to cause the group to end up in the wrong place with such low supplies. But I feel like the winter camp is the heart of the Donner Party's notoriety, and where the most obvious horror waits to be crafted; it's shocking that Katsu chooses to spend such a tiny segment of The Hunger there. And even when the narration does finally reach the winter camp, most of that section is spent following characters outside of the camp itself – a group who tries to hike out to find help, and a group who halted earlier and so is further down the trail. It's such a strange absence that I have to assume Katsu left it out deliberately, but I have no idea why. Maybe she felt it was too obvious? But it left me feeling like The Hunger was all build-up and resolution without a climax in between.
The monsters themselves are most similar to wendigos, although that word never actually appears in The Hunger, probably so that Katsu could give the folklore her own twist. There are elements of werewolves here too, and maybe just a touch of zombies. All of this is nicely done and creepy enough, if it hadn't just been buried in chapters and chapters of boring writing style, characters I didn't care about, and "hidden secrets" that were obvious from page one.
Full Throttle by Joe Hill. A collection of thirteen short horror stories. Well, mostly horror. A few are more literary than horrific. I really enjoyed Full Throttle; I seem to like Hill's writing better in short story form than in full novels, because this is my favorite book of his since 20th Century Ghosts.
Let me cover just a few of my favorite stories:
All I Care About Is You – in a not too futuristic sci-fi setting (with worldbuilding very reminiscent of the 1950s; I recognized a few elements taken almost directly from The Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury) a newly poor girl whose friends are all still rich celebrates her sixteenth birthday alone, with only a robot for company. There's a twist at the end which I did not see coming at all and which fit well, but which might be too grimdark for some readers. I loved it.
Faun – what if the door to Narnia was discovered not by sweet innocent children but a venal big game hunter?
By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain – a group of small children in the 1930s discover the dead body of a Nessie-esque lake monster. This story had a style different than most of Hill's writing: lovely and nostalgic and almost silver colored.
You Are Released – a random flight from LA to Boston is in the air over North Dakota when World War III suddenly begins and the nuclear weapons start falling. The POV switches between an assortment of passengers – an aging celebrity, a MAGA-hat-wearing news producer, a gay Jewish man, a young South Korean woman, a spelling bee champion little girl – as they slowly realize what's happening. This is another of the stories that's less horror and more just sad and tender.
There's also two stories that depend on a structural gimmick. In both cases I'm not sure the gimmick itself worked, but I liked each story, so meh.
The Devil on the Staircase – set in the steep cliffs of the Amalfi Coast in the late 1800s, this story concerns a laborer who spends his days carting loads up and down staircases until he discovers one particular staircase that leads to hell. The rhythm of the writing here wonderfully mimics the cadence of an authentic folktale, and the text is set to look like a series of staircases:
I
hated
him of
course.
He had his
cats and he
sang to them
and poured them
saucers of milk and
told them foolish stories
and stroked them in his lap
and when one time I kicked one–
I do not remember why–he kicked me to
the floor and said not to touch his babies.
Twittering from the Circus of the Dead – a teenage girl live-tweets her family roadtrip and their decision to check out a small town attraction starring zombies. The story is told as a series of actual tweets: timestamps, screennames, and all. It is unsurprisingly annoying to read 15 pages of tweets, but honestly I'm not sure how else the plot could work. This story is like the "found footage" genre done in writing.
One of my least favorite stories was In the Tall Grass (cowritten with Stephen King), in which a brother and pregnant sister get lost in a field of grass and discover that getting back out is more complicated than it seems. It was certainly brutal and gross, but there just wasn't much to the story outside of that. Of course, this is the story which has now been turned into a movie by Netflix; you can watch the trailer here.
But despite that complaint, even the stories that didn't stand out to me were better than average. Overall, a really excellent collection, especially for Halloween!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Unfortunately the execution is not as good. The Hunger has gotten a ton of good press and even been nominated for several awards since it came out last year, and I really can't imagine why. The writing is flat, the characters are a collection of historical fiction cliches (the sexy bad girl, the naive good girl, the honorable man who is unfairly judged by others, the closeted gay man who's obsessed with sin), the themes could have been interesting but Katsu doesn't quite manage to bring them full circle, and it's not even that scary.
The vast, vast majority of the book concerns the party's progress along the trail before getting to its infamous winter camp snowed in up in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Which is fair enough, I suppose: plenty went wrong beforehand to cause the group to end up in the wrong place with such low supplies. But I feel like the winter camp is the heart of the Donner Party's notoriety, and where the most obvious horror waits to be crafted; it's shocking that Katsu chooses to spend such a tiny segment of The Hunger there. And even when the narration does finally reach the winter camp, most of that section is spent following characters outside of the camp itself – a group who tries to hike out to find help, and a group who halted earlier and so is further down the trail. It's such a strange absence that I have to assume Katsu left it out deliberately, but I have no idea why. Maybe she felt it was too obvious? But it left me feeling like The Hunger was all build-up and resolution without a climax in between.
The monsters themselves are most similar to wendigos, although that word never actually appears in The Hunger, probably so that Katsu could give the folklore her own twist. There are elements of werewolves here too, and maybe just a touch of zombies. All of this is nicely done and creepy enough, if it hadn't just been buried in chapters and chapters of boring writing style, characters I didn't care about, and "hidden secrets" that were obvious from page one.
Full Throttle by Joe Hill. A collection of thirteen short horror stories. Well, mostly horror. A few are more literary than horrific. I really enjoyed Full Throttle; I seem to like Hill's writing better in short story form than in full novels, because this is my favorite book of his since 20th Century Ghosts.
Let me cover just a few of my favorite stories:
All I Care About Is You – in a not too futuristic sci-fi setting (with worldbuilding very reminiscent of the 1950s; I recognized a few elements taken almost directly from The Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury) a newly poor girl whose friends are all still rich celebrates her sixteenth birthday alone, with only a robot for company. There's a twist at the end which I did not see coming at all and which fit well, but which might be too grimdark for some readers. I loved it.
Faun – what if the door to Narnia was discovered not by sweet innocent children but a venal big game hunter?
By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain – a group of small children in the 1930s discover the dead body of a Nessie-esque lake monster. This story had a style different than most of Hill's writing: lovely and nostalgic and almost silver colored.
You Are Released – a random flight from LA to Boston is in the air over North Dakota when World War III suddenly begins and the nuclear weapons start falling. The POV switches between an assortment of passengers – an aging celebrity, a MAGA-hat-wearing news producer, a gay Jewish man, a young South Korean woman, a spelling bee champion little girl – as they slowly realize what's happening. This is another of the stories that's less horror and more just sad and tender.
There's also two stories that depend on a structural gimmick. In both cases I'm not sure the gimmick itself worked, but I liked each story, so meh.
The Devil on the Staircase – set in the steep cliffs of the Amalfi Coast in the late 1800s, this story concerns a laborer who spends his days carting loads up and down staircases until he discovers one particular staircase that leads to hell. The rhythm of the writing here wonderfully mimics the cadence of an authentic folktale, and the text is set to look like a series of staircases:
I
hated
him of
course.
He had his
cats and he
sang to them
and poured them
saucers of milk and
told them foolish stories
and stroked them in his lap
and when one time I kicked one–
I do not remember why–he kicked me to
the floor and said not to touch his babies.
So I
carried
his rocks
when I should
have been carrying
schoolbooks, but I cannot
pretend I hated him for that.
I had no use for school, hated to
study, hated to read, felt acutely the
stifling heat of the single room schoolhouse,
the only good thing in it my cousin, Lithodora, who
read to the little children, sitting on a stool with her
back erect, chin lifted high, and her white throat showing.
Twittering from the Circus of the Dead – a teenage girl live-tweets her family roadtrip and their decision to check out a small town attraction starring zombies. The story is told as a series of actual tweets: timestamps, screennames, and all. It is unsurprisingly annoying to read 15 pages of tweets, but honestly I'm not sure how else the plot could work. This story is like the "found footage" genre done in writing.
One of my least favorite stories was In the Tall Grass (cowritten with Stephen King), in which a brother and pregnant sister get lost in a field of grass and discover that getting back out is more complicated than it seems. It was certainly brutal and gross, but there just wasn't much to the story outside of that. Of course, this is the story which has now been turned into a movie by Netflix; you can watch the trailer here.
But despite that complaint, even the stories that didn't stand out to me were better than average. Overall, a really excellent collection, especially for Halloween!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-16 09:12 pm (UTC)I am sorry it doesn't pull that combination off! It worked so beautifully for The Terror (AMC, not Simmons). Mostly it sounds like the book would just leave me wanting to rewatch Ravenous (1999).
– set in the steep cliffs of the Amalfi Coast in the late 1800s, this story concerns a laborer who spends his days carting loads up and down staircases until he discovers one particular staircase that leads to hell.
With or without its gimmick, "The Devil on the Staircase" sounds great.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-17 09:10 pm (UTC)Ha, I also kept thinking of The Terror, though I was worried that was too obvious a comparison. It's such an odd coincidence that both events took place just a year apart! I hadn't quite realized that before, perhaps because it took so long for the realization of what happened to the Franklin Expedition to trickle out. There's got to be an interesting study somewhere comparing public reactions to both tragedies, or how the earlier Donner Party response influenced the Franklin response, though I don't know if anyone's written it yet or if it's still waiting to exist.
There must be more "real historical tragedy + monsters" books out there, though perhaps it only works when the history part is distant enough that it doesn't feel exploitation.
With or without its gimmick, "The Devil on the Staircase" sounds great.
It was! NPR has a longer excerpt, though I think the story didn't really take off for me until a bit further along.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-17 09:27 pm (UTC)I'd love to read it, so I hope it's the former!
There must be more "real historical tragedy + monsters" books out there, though perhaps it only works when the history part is distant enough that it doesn't feel exploitation.
I am drawing a blank on a subgenre I know I've encountered more examples of, but I did write this story with a golem and the A-bomb.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-22 07:08 pm (UTC)Oh, fascinating! I need to read that. Is it in Forget the Sleepless Shores?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-22 08:53 pm (UTC)Yes, it is! "The Trinitite Golem," originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 5. Enjoy!