...a rage that wanted to devour him, or wanted him to devour the world — he wasn’t sure which.[loc. 4181]
I was in the mood for a horror novel, but didn't find this one especially chilling. The setting is the American West in the middle of the 19th century, and a disparate group of people are travelling in a wagon train from Illinois to California. The land is not adequately mapped, there are rumours of a short cut, and winter is coming: and there is something very hungry out in the woods, something that the local tribes call na'it and revere as a wolf spirit.
This is the Donner Party, with werewolves (of a sort). It's also a study of the clashing personalities in the party: Donner and Reed at loggerheads, Stanton making ill-advised liaisons, Bryant with his urge to explain everything with science... as Katsu writes in her afterword, "The group let themselves be divided by pettiness and class differences. They let themselves be fooled by businessmen who valued personal profit over human lives. They selected the wrong man to be their leader and refused to listen to the people among them who knew better."
Katsu turns the traditional 'evil native spirits' trope on its head, which is to be applauded. She focusses on a number of characters, each with a dire (and usually sexual) secret, and shows how their histories inform their actions. That was more interesting to me than the horror aspect, which I found more pitiable than frightening. To be fair, my tastes in horror are idiosyncratic: give me an understated touch or a solitary terror, any day, over monsters and gore.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 11 APR 2018.
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