Alma Katsu’s The Hunger and The Deep

History is fickle. We all know that, right? That the “facts” in our historical recollections at best belong to survivors of an event, in the middle belong to those relying on recollections and their own perceptions and observations, and at worst to those who achieved victory and rewrite their struggles to turn them into heroes. It’s all got some modicum of storytelling and fiction. Alma Katsu seizes this whole concept and then runs off with it to create some paranormal shenanigans.

To be transparent: I stumbled upon Alma Katsu’s books by accident. I had meant to check out Nick Cutter’s book The Deep, but when you mix the library app with sleep meds, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. So, I ended up with a book by Katsu.

The Deep is about the Titanic and the Brittannic in two timelines involving, relatively, the same people. The beginning of the book starts with a letter from a father to a sanitorium regarding his missing daughter, Annie Hebley. The doctor, in a rare moment for a physician at the beginning of the century, decides to leave the question unanswered out of respect for the patient’s privacy. Annie has been his patient for years, even though no one thinks anything is wrong with her. Her call to action is a letter from an old friend, one she met on the Titanic, regarding a position of a nurse aboard the once sister of the doomed ship, the Britannic. Encouraged by the hospital, she takes the position. 

From there, the timeline switches between the Titanic and the Britannic. Annie, a servant to the first class on the Titanic, integrates herself with the culture and spiritualist conjecture of the rich, becoming entangled within their affairs and fearing their talk of spiritual possession. She also meets the husband of a wealthy woman and creeps on him for a bit, while everything else melts down on the ship and the inevitable happens.

That’s pretty much what happens on the Britannic as well. The man, who Annie was sure died on the Titanic, shows up as a wounded soldier on her new boat and having learned zero manners in the years since the disaster, she creeps on him some more and tells him of all the sexy things they did together. Of course, he remembers none of it. There’s a whole reason for it, and we already know the Britannic sank too. Chick is 0/2.

The Hunger also deals with a historical event, the Donner Party. I don’t think I have to rehash 90% of that. People go west. Rich people make poor leadership decisions. They get caught in the snow and start eating each other because long pork is better than dying of starvation. Except this time, the party is being pursued by something that likes eating everything below the skull of little kids, some people are acting bizarre and attacking others, and some of the more prominent historical figures (Tamsen Donner) may be witches or psychics or mediums or whatever.

I feel like I should like these books. I like history. I like ghosts. Hell, I even like the whole mysterious, possible-cryptid eating people. And yet, there’s something a little too precious for me in her writing, even as she describes cannibalism and vengeful spirits. And maybe I’ll still read her other stuff, because I have a morbid fascination with confirmation of trends and an abiding love of being happily surprised. It’s why I did a deepdive into Hester Fox, and despite never finding a deep appreciation for Fox’s work, I at least settled into a familiarity with it.  I know I’ll pick up her newish one about the internment camps, even if her romantic-specific historic peeps-paranormal is kind of a little too…prissy? For me, at least, though I recognize that it’s a viable style and format for a lot of other readers so I still want to support the work.

Would I Read it Again?: No. The style isn’t my jam. I (probably) keep throwing myself at whatever else she publishes, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any rereads of old material.Rating: A solid 3, and The Hunger pulled The Deep kicking and screaming there. Like I said, this is definitely for somebody, and it’s okay for whoever that person is. I have some weird issues around rewriting actual events, especially when they were such awful tragedies for those involved, but that’s my spider-filled brain trying to wrap itself around historical theory and how malleable it can be in fiction.