The true-life story of the Donner party, American pioneers who set out for California in 1846 but took a poorly advised shortcut through the mountains and ended up snowed in for the winter, with survivors reportedly resorting to cannibalism, is terrifying enough on its own. In Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (Bantam, £14.99), a hint of the supernatural is added to the proceedings to create an absorbing, menacing thriller that had me digging into the history behind this tale as soon as I’d read the last page.
Katsu opens her novel as a rescue team arrive at an abandoned cabin the summer after George Donner’s party set off. They find nothing but “a scattering of teeth”, and “what looked like a human vertebra, cleaned of skin”. She then leaps back in time, as the long wagon train makes its way across the vast empty spaces of the American prairie. Her descriptions of the land are movingly beautiful, but there is danger even here, as we learn that a child has vanished. “A young boy might be swallowed up in all this vastness, in the unrelenting space that stretched in all directions, in the horizons that yoked even the sun down to heel.”
As the wagons, filled with old people, children and babies, roll onwards, Katsu imparts a sense of urgency: winter is coming, mountains lie ahead, and the food is running out. When Donner makes a bad mistake, choosing the untested, apparently shorter route through the virtually impassable, tree-choked hills, and the children start disappearing, the survivors start to realise it isn’t only the elements that are against them. This nerve-jangling, persuasive story of survival and desperation stands alongside The Terror, Dan Simmons’s excellent supernatural take on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to find the north-west passage.
Peter Swanson’s All the Beautiful Lies (Faber & Faber, £12.99) is a slice of classic crime, a dark, atmospheric read that takes place on the coast of Maine. Harry has just graduated from college when he learns that his father, a book dealer with a rather lovely penchant for making lists (“five best campus crime novels”, etc), has unexpectedly died. He returns home to his stepmother Alice, his father’s young second wife whom Harry barely knows and for whom he now develops disturbingly sexual feelings. Harry – beautifully drawn as an adolescent on the brink of adulthood – soon discovers that his father’s death on a cliff path was not an accident.
Swanson shifts his narrative between past misdemeanours and present ones, and between Harry and Alice, in the process conjuring up one of the most believable, unsettling murderers I’ve encountered for some time.
Harry is hard to forget as he reels in the grip of a “revolting sense of pure grief”, which “swept through him like an attack of nausea, an absolute knowledge that he was all alone and life was meaningless and devoid of joy”.
Julia Heaberlin’s unnamed protagonist in Paper Ghosts (Michael Joseph, £12.99) is also bereaved: her sister Rachel vanished 12 years ago, and she has been looking for her ever since. “It took a long, long time to find the man I believe killed my sister. Years. Dozens of interviews. Hundreds of suspects,” she says. “It’s been a singular, no-holds-barred obsession since I was 12 and my sister’s bike didn’t make it the three miles from our house to her summer babysitting job.”
Her suspect is Carl Feldman, a photographer who was tried for murder and acquitted, but who our heroine believes has links, through his photographs, to a series of dead girls. Carl is now elderly and suffering from dementia; Heaberlin’s protagonist pretends to be his daughter and breaks him out of the home where he lives to take him on a disturbing, creepy road trip in the hope it will jog his memory and lead him to reveal what happened to Rachel.
“I’d remember if I ran around killing people. That’s what dementia patients do,” Carl tells her. “They remember the past like it was fucking yesterday. I remember the first picture I ever shot, and I sure as hell remember what iced tea is supposed to taste like. So I’m pretty sure I’d remember what it was like to slit a throat.” But Heaberlin, author of the impressive Black-Eyed Susans, plays her cards close to her chest, careful to give away little about the motivations of either of her characters, as her heroine edges closer to the truth.
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