THE HUNGER

Alma Katsu’s speculative thriller THE HUNGER is a riff on the historical tale of the Donner Party that asks: “What if there were Others in the mountains of Wyoming?”

One of the more spectacular and bizarre tragedies in American history, the story of the Donner Party has often been used as a cautionary tale: a group of nearly 90 pioneers, heading to California on an arduous journey from Springfield, Illinois, in 1846, decided to pursue an experimental route through the mountains of Wyoming in desperation. What the pioneers found there went beyond the fury of the natural elements – they encountered the volatility of human nature, pushed to its breaking point.

In THE HUNGER, the tragic story of the Donner Party is reimagined with a Walking Dead-style twist: What if there was something else in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased… and hungry? Real-life characters Edwin Bryant, Charles Stanton, and James Reed struggle to survive bleak mountain conditions and inter-personal battles and overcome the personal dramas that threaten to engulf them when members of their party begin disappearing, one by one, in circumstances that creep into supernatural territory.

Alma Katsu’s debut novel, The Taker, has been compared to the early work of Anne Rice, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for combining the historical, supernatural and fantasy in one story. The novel was named a Top Ten Debut Novel of 2011 by the American Library Association and rights have sold been in sixteen languages. The Reckoning, the second book in the trilogy, was published in June 2012, and the third and final book, The Descent, came out in January 2014. The Taker Trilogy is published by Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster and Arrow/Random House UK. Ms. Katsu lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. In addition to her novels, Ms. Katsu has been a signature reviewer for Publishers Weekly and an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post. She is a graduate of the Master's writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, where she studied with John Irving. She also attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Prior to publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several US agencies and is currently a senior analyst for a think tank.