Alma Katsu's The Hunger and The Double Sinister

Alma Katsu knew, even before writing her prizewinning 2018 novel The Hunger, that historical fiction is fraught with risks. That’s especially true when you are taking on an historical event as familiar as “the Donner Party,” a tragedy that has assumed an almost folkloric status in the American national imagination.

The Donner Party refers to a wagon train of some 90 pioneers headed to California in 1846. Forty members of the group starved to death when heavy snows stranded them in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Many of the survivors got through that winter by feeding on the flesh of their fallen fellow journeymen.

It is the taboo topic of cannibalism that keeps alive modern society's fascination with the Donner Party — not to mention that it is part of many schools' history curricula (Simon).

Less familiar are the details that led up to the nightmarish scenario of starvation and extreme survival, and the intertwining of personal hubris with larger, darker historical forces of nation-building. Indeed, the full story of the Donner party has been compared to “a Hitchcock film of westward expansion” in which the protagonists are hapless players in a nefarious scheme that will ultimately consume them (Deverell).

The Hunger cleverly builds upon the almost invisible operations of American colonization, using fiction to steer readers to another level of awareness, the achievement of which encourages a more resonant horror arising from the recognition that evil need not be rooted in the supernatural, but may nestled grub-like within the heart of Western culture.

Katsu refuses to go down the easy path of cannibal exploitation, and connects instead with the contemporary zeitgeist of divisiveness, distrust, and dread that defines the post-9/11 American sociopolitical experience.

This makes sense insofar as one of the strengths of the historical novel is its ability to “impart a vivid immediacy to past events” and allow the reader to “draw near” the unreachable past (Langan). By looking at the past, the historical novel also enables an examination of the present.

Indeed, Katsu goes so far as to see her novel as a cautionary tale for a society that has allowed itself to fall prey to pettiness, division, and pride. “You only need to look around to realize that things haven’t changed that much today” (Katsu, For Winter Nights).

But Katsu takes an even more adventurous route through the rocky pass of history by bringing her protagonists into conflict with an extraordinary menace. Like fellow American author Dan Simmons whose 2007 novel The Terror spins the disappearance in 1848 of a British naval expedition in the Arctic into a tale of monstrous horror, Katsu’s The Hunger “weaves a cocoon of supernatural horror around historical tragedy” (Lovegrove). What emerges from this interweave of horror and history is the sinister aspect of the metaphysical and philosophical underpinnings of Western society.

While Katsu maintains the element of cannibalism in The Hunger, she simultaneously heightens and sidelines it by imagining into the drama a pack of werewolf-like creatures that stalk the already doomed wagon train. The indigenous people of the area, the Washoe tribe, call the monsters the na’it. The tribal people are equally terrorized by these creatures and suffer as the na’it consume the region’s edible prey, creating an ecological imbalance that forces the tribe to survive on foraging and fishing — two skills the white pioneers lack.

An Old World Plague

The origins of this werewolf — Langan prefers the term lycanthrope — remains unsettled. The Washoe see the na’it as evil spirits that possess the bodies of their victims (Katsu 255). Another indigenous tribe, the fictional Anawai, are pushed to the point of worshiping the na’it, going so far as to make human sacrifices to “this wolf spirit” (78). But one of the novel’s primary protagonists (a journalist with experiential training in medicine and an interest in anthropology) is convinced that the curse which turns men into monsters should more rightly be seen as an illness, a “sickness” (255).

And like many diseases, the disease of lycanthropy may maintain an infective agent within non-symptomatic carriers. That carrier is the German immigrant Reiner Keseberg, a prospector who precedes the wagon train to pan for gold in the foothills that belong to the Washoe people. Reiner is introduced through the eyes of his nephew Lewis as a man of cunning whose “wolf-bright” eyes of fire “held sickening secrets.” Reiner brings from Europe the family trait of “epic and unpredictable” fury. Reiner tells his young nephew, when they meet in the United States, that the only ancestral inheritance he can expect is already “in your blood” (318-319, 321). What the Keseberg men carry within them is a “curse” that keeps them forever transitory, on the run. “If you stay in one place, they will catch you,” Reiner warns (321).

In 1840, Reiner follows his blood westward as a prospector into what is still tribal territory, an early representative of the national dream of Manifest Destiny that would lead to the full colonization of the tribal nations. Reiner seeks the freedom to allow his Old World curse an open expression without fear of the hangman’s noose: “Men like us can roam free” with nobody watching, he says (319). Six years after his departure, Reiner’s nephew Lewis will follow his own blood instinct and set off into the “untamed” West as part of the Donner Party pioneer caravan.

All who survive the bite of the na’it can expect full transformation into monstrosity. One of the first members of the wagon train to experience this change is Luke Halloran, who is suggested to have taken on the illness somehow from his own infected dog. Halloran’s gentle and generous personality is slowly replaced by something darker, stronger, and more vicious. As his friend Tamsen Donner observes the change, she sees that “He wasn’t himself; he wasn’t even a man” (141). In his cunning attack upon Tamsen, the newly turned na’it confesses that he is driven by the pain of a hunger that “hollows you.” “Even my blood is starving” (140).

What may be the last vestige of Halloran’s humanity reveals itself through an odd request: he asks Tamsen to willingly offer her flesh to him. “I could take it if I had to, from you or one of the others. …But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather you gave it to me freely, like a friend would” (140-141).

This one instance of the hunter expecting its prey to voluntarily give itself up echoes an indigenous attitude toward the animal world, a metaphysical view that leads the successful hunter to express both sorrow and gratitude to the animal that has just agreed to die so that the tribe may live (Kowtko 104).

Of course, here the novelist leaves herself open to criticism that her monstrous na’it are representative of the tribal people through whose land the wagon trains are trespassing (Langan). Katsu, however, sidesteps this criticism by including the Native people as victims of the na’it. Indeed, it is the European immigrant — the prospector Reiner Keseberg — who is suggested as the patient zero of the na’it, killing his fellow prospectors in camp before moving on to plague both the Native tribes and the trespassing California-bound wagon trains (Langan). 

From within the Donner Party caravan the younger Lewis Keseberg is making a less-obvious transformation, one that does not include the physical attributes of the na’it such as a snakelike unhinged jaw and a mouth lined with far too many sharp teeth. The change Lewis undergoes is an acknowledgment of his ability to contain the na’it sickness within himself and his ambiguous embrace of the craving for human flesh that comes with it. Unfortunately for Lewis “the taste of human blood never satiated him, but made the need for it even stronger” (366).

The Double Sinister: Metaphysical
In the Keseberg family and its journey from Germany and across the Midwestern plains Katsu provides a dual criticism of two of the most powerful philosophical forces of European history. The first of these is in the realm of metaphysics.

Italian writer Curzio Malaparte notes that “humans become more authentically human” in the forest. “Nothing makes men so mutually hostile … renders them so callous and inexorable, as the preternatural violence of the forest.” In the forest, he says, “man rediscovers his primordial instincts” (qtd. in Gray, Loc. 284).

It is only through the lens of Judeo-Christian theology that we can see why the “primordial” man’s “authentically human” aspect would be understood as violent: one of the earliest themes arising from ancient Judaism’s “holy books” is human existence is “only an unending struggle with our own nature” (Gray Loc. 845) in a world cursed by God after the fall of man and the expulsion from Paradise in the book of Genesis (Mann 194).

In The Hunger, Lewis’ abandoning of himself to his “blood nature” is suggested as being encouraged by the natural wildness of the environment. As one traumatized protagonist ponders: “Maybe that was the curse of these mountains — they turned you mad, then reflected your own madness back at you, incarnate. Like some sort of biblical punishment” (333).

The Western concept of the “wilderness” as empty, in contrast to the indigenous relationship with the land, is an obvious part of Katsu’s novel as she contrasts the tribal people’s ability to find nourishment with the European and American migrants’ starvation on the same ground. While the indigenous relationship with the land is symbiotic, the Euro-American invaders bring with them an assumption gleaned in part from Abrahamic sources that the earth is to be “subjugated” and “ruled over” by humanity.

It is no wonder that the first infliction of the na’it comes into the tribal lands through Reiner Keseberg, one of a camp of prospectors whose shovels and axes serve as monstrous teeth to devour the land. Like many such representatives of colonization in North America, the prospectors invaded tribal territories, sullied the tribes’ sacred geographies, and strove for both the physical and cultural genocide of the indigenous people.

The antebellum policies of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the 1862 Homestead Act serve as legislative highlights of the political embrace in Washington DC of the ideological concept of Manifest Destiny and it’s justification of colonization and attempted genocide. White conquest was seen as a divine commandment, the land becoming “nothing more than a commodity to be subdued” along with the tribal people and their cultures (Mann 195).

Tragically, as some Native American scholars argue, the “terse situation created by the colonizers’ ambition, fear, misunderstanding, and lack of respect” for indigenous boundaries “is still a major problem for many Native Americans today” (Talamantez 280). One of the most recent examples of this, unarguably, is the legal maneuvering by the Trump Administration in mid-September 2019 to shut down lawsuits brought about by Native American tribal lawyers to block the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska and across their tribal nations’ lands (Brown).

The Double Sinister: Philosophical
If the prospectors-turned-na’it are a monstrous icon of an ancient Western cultural legacy inherited from the Judeo-Christian sources, the wagon train of migrants and their final group leader — Lewis Keseberg — portray another branch of European heritage that has proven venomous to both the indigenous people and their lands in North America.

Lewis is the personification of the values arising from the European philosophical project of the Enlightenment.

Emerging from a variety of sources, but most especially from the rise of scientific and technological advances, the Enlightenment was a defining period of Western history that found its full stride in the Eighteenth Century. Through the multivariate influences that gave rise to Enlightenment thinking, Europeans “awoke to a new sense of life” in which they “experienced an expansive sense of power over nature and themselves” (Gay 3).

The Eighteenth Century was what Peter Gay calls “the age of political arithmetic,” when the modern academic study of economics was born and the influence of thinkers such as Adam Smith helped deliver from the womb of the Enlightenment the ever-transitioning but still-powerful chimeric behemoth called Capitalism (344). In the hands of the Enlightenment’s most strident advocates, economics achieved ascendency over every other discipline, including statesmanship (Gay 345). What then rose is the reliance upon accountancy as a sociocultural value necessary for the management of all aspects of the human experience — an ascendancy that remains at full height in today’s Neoliberal world.

Among the pioneers in The Hunger who survived to see the wagon train through to the novel’s snow-encrusted denouement, Lewis Keseberg is by far the most “numeric.” In her final encounter with him, Tamsen Donner recalls how even at the start of the migration westward the other travelers had developed an aversion to playing cards with Lewis, whose mathematically talented mind enabled him to win games by what we today would call the strategy of “counting cards” (365).

When the snows fall for many weeks it is Lewis who steps forward to keep the remaining travelers — mostly children by this point — alive through the careful harvesting of those who die of starvation. Lewis puts his mathematically inclined mind to the calculation of how much flesh would be needed to feed himself and the other survivors, with some set aside for the na’it — “Just enough so they won’t come sniffing around too close to camp” (365).

Taking from his pile of carefully piled corpses Lewis calculates how many more will be needed to maintain the migrant camp through the remaining weeks of winter. It is an accounting that the other pioneers are unaware of. Indeed, they do not know that it is human flesh butchered from the frozen bodies of their deceased kin that Lewis is using to keep them barely alive, even as he shows no sign of starvation. “I saved ‘em all” from starvation, Lewis brags. “They’d never agree to it. …But it’s the only way to live. …they just don’t want to have to know where it’s from” (365).

Placing the blame for the cannibalism upon the shoulders of a monstrous figure enervated by an ancient blood disease is a clever narrative strategy, argues New York Times reviewer Danielle Trussoni. “With blame shifted to the spirit world, we’re off the hook, and able to relax and enjoy the journey” (Trussoni). The unspoken suspicion remains in Katsu’s novel that the survivors understand the nature of the nourishment offered to them by Lewis. They just don’t want to have to know. Of course, it is easy to understand that they would choose to remain within their snowbound shelters, their eyes closed to the horrible reality around them. But that does not relieve them of culpability in the cannibalism of their deceased families and fellow travelers.

The survivors, in their complicity, join Lewis as representative of the Enlightenment values that allowed them to play walk-on parts in the larger drama of colonization and attempted genocide. Violence, after all, is the final result of Enlightenment ideals taken to their extreme, as argued by cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida, among others. The Enlightenment principle of “pure practical reason” (as put forth in Immanual Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason first published in 1781) is essentially “an act of war” that is “hateful, cruel, criminal, incriminating” and ultimately result in “death … and murder” (Derrida 101). Derrida maintains this critique of Cartesian ethics in his examination of animality and what he sees as the human “war” against animals, but is swift to note the applicability of his interrogation to the other “taboo” animal: “the animal in man” (103).

Derrida’s (and Adorno’s) condemnation of Enlightenment ethics sees the “rational” man as essentially violent, with the expression of “this project of human mastery over nature and over animality” (Derrida 102) being revealed in a war against all animal life. Sadly, this vision of the Enlightenment experience resulting in something of an apocalyptic embrace of what Sigmund Freud speculated as the human psyche’s death drive, is too easily imagined in the current age of climate change, when unchecked fires threaten the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia, and majority supported fascist leadership returns to power in diverse nation states.

It is this zeitgeist that Katsu skillfully addresses in The Hunger and its expression of ecological distress brought about by all-too-(in)human monstrosities — abjection that springs not from the earth, but from the metaphysical and philosophical myths out of which Euro-American subjectivity arose. The most gripping horror in The Hunger is the unspoken history beneath this historical fiction. 


Related Links:

This is Horror Podcast Interview with Alma Katsu

The Inside Flap Podcast Interview with Alma Katsu

More to Read Interview with Alma Katsu

Alma Katsu Author Homepage

Alma Katsu Wikipedia Entry



Works Cited

Brown, Matthew. “Trump Administration Wants Tribes’ Keystone XL Lawsuit Dismissed.” The Associated Press. Global News. 10 September 2019. Online: https://globalnews.ca/news/5883513/trump-keystone-pipeline-lawsuit/?utm_expid=.kz0UD5JkQOCo6yMqxGqECg.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fglobalnews.ca%2Fnews%2F5883513%2Ftrump-keystone-pipeline-lawsuit%2F

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. David Wills, Trans. Marie-Louise Mallet, Ed. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP. 2008. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=y8Drc-QghEIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+animal+that+therefore+i+am&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQvbL3j9rkAhUewosBHY74AlIQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=the%20animal%20that%20therefore%20i%20am&f=false

Deverell, William. “The Lasting Pull of the Donner Saga.” Los Angeles Times. 22 March 2019. Online: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-mar-22-ca-gabrielle-burton22-story.html

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Science of Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton. 1969.

Gray, John. The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. New York: Farrar, Strous, and Girous. 2014. Ebook. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=xNgPCHwTcF8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gray,+John.+Animal&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqufH5jdrkAhUpK6YKHYwHAEQQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Gray%2C%20John.%20Animal&f=false

Katsu, Alma. The Hunger. New York: Putnam. 2018.

---. “History and The Hunger: Guest Post by Alma Katsu, Author of The Hunger.” For Winter Nights: A Bookish Blog. 5 March 2018. Online: https://forwinternights.wordpress.com/2018/03/05/history-and-the-hunger-guest-post-by-alma-katsu-author-of-the-hunger/

Kowtko, Stacy. Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P. 2006. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=imVo2JUAF2AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Langan, John. “John Langan Reviews The Hunger by Alma Katsu.” Locus. 29 May 2018. Online: https://locusmag.com/2018/05/john-langan-reviews-the-hunger-by-alma-katsu-and-the-teardrop-method-by-simon-avery/

Lovegrove, James. “Short Review: The Hunger by Alma Katsu.” Financial Times. 1 June 2018. Online: https://www.ft.com/content/ffefbbd2-591b-11e8-806a-808d194ffb75

Mann, Henrietta. “Earth Mother and Prayerful Children: Sacred Sites and Religious Freedom.” Native Voices: American Indian Identity & Resistance. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins. Eds. Lawrence: UP of Kansas. 2003. 194-208.

Simon, Scott. “Teaching the Grim Reality of the Donner Party.” NPR. 7 March 2015. Online: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/07/391435893/teaching-the-grim-reality-of-the-donner-party

Talamantez, Inez. “Transforming American Perceptions about Native America: Vine Deloria Jr., Critic and Coyote.” Native Voices: American Indian Identity & Resistance. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins. Eds. Lawrence: UP of Kansas. 2003. 273-289.

Trussoni, Danielle. “Summer Reads: Horror.” New York Times Book Review. 23 May 2019. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/books/best-horror-novels.html

Click to go to source of Graphic Image

When More is Better?

I came across a short piece in a 2011 edition of "Scientific American Mind" entitled "The Power of Negative Thinking." The article noted research suggesting that both the experience of something painful (physically or emotionally) and the expectation that we will experience that same negative sensation again actually enables us to go through repeated experiences with less discomfort.

My mind immediately went to the horror film audience, or at least the ones who enjoy repeated and similar experiences of shock, disgust, fear, through the medium of film. So once you've seen a realistically believable beheading on film, you can go on watching various slasher films where the heads go thunk as they hit the ground. It's not so terrible the second time around.

But then I remember other suggestions that viewing horror and experiencing those "negatively charged" emotions is a positive thrill, something enjoyable and even desirable. Does that mean that once you lose the "thrill" or the ability to be shocked and scared, you no longer enjoy horror cinema as much? Or perhaps I should say that you no longer "desire" seeing a film that promises similar scenes of gore and violence? Does this lead to falling ticket sales for sequels far down a franchise assembly line? Or does this explain why so many viewers demand the same old "slash" but offered in new and creative ways?

French "Zombi Child" Calls Upon Voodoo Tropes

We don’t often see the traditional African-Haitian zombie trope in contemporary cinema, but French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello has made use of this icon of colonial slavery in his new film Zombi Child. The folkloristic zombie — a corpse revived by a powerful magician for the purpose of providing free agricultural labor — is used by the director to address contemporary issues of racism and an ongoing legacy of class-based biases within modern French society.

With dual narratives, the film begins in 1962 with the burial of recently deceased Clairvius Narcisse, his awakening from the grave with aphasic and amnesiac, and forced into labor on the sugarcane fields each night.

The story of Clairvius and his gradual reclamation of speech, memory, and social freedom is interspersed with the present-day life of his granddaughter Melissa as she makes friends and comes to recognize the invisible and unspoken structures of power as gradually revealed in the workings of an elite Parisian girl’s school.

Andrew Spitznas, blogging for the Patheos website, emphasizes the intellectual strength of the film, noting that the director-screenwriter not only uses Zombi Child to examine experiences of otherness, disenfranchisement, cannibalistic capitalism, mourning and loss, but also to interrogate the arguments of influential European intellectuals and philosophers.

Jonathan Romney said in his ScreenDaily review of the film after viewing it at the Cannes Film Festival: "Mixing political commentary, ethnography, teenage melodrama and genre horror, the film is an unashamedly cerebral study of multiple themes — colonialism, revolution, liberalism, racial difference and female desire — with its unconventional narrative structure taking us a journey that’s as intellectually demanding as it is compelling."

The film’s narrative structure leads to what Slant magazine reviewer Sam C. Mac calls “a feverish payoff, one that uses genre and supernatural elements to further Bonello’s idea of there being one historical continuity.”

All reviewers agree in identifying Bonello’s Zombi Child as a work of supernatural horror developed upon the fertile soil of sociopolitical critique. Bonello said in an interview that both his interest in French history and the Romero zombie encouraged him to look backward to the Voodoo origins of the modern horror icon.

"I wanted to trace (the pop horror icon) to its origins, to something much more real and human," Bonello said, "because these people (zombies of folklore), they’re not dead — theoretically they’re people that don’t find a place in hell, so they come back to earth. They’re alive, they’re between life and death, between night and day."

Here’s a link to an English-subtitled trailer, though as is so often the case with YouTube you’re going to have to sit through a few seconds of advertisement before you can go directly to the trailer. As far as I can tell, the film is not yet available for sale or streaming.

Zombies on the Beach

“Chopping up zombies is good fun for everyone,” says ShowBiz Cheatsheet blogger Fred Topel in his review of the new Syfy channel offering, Zombie Tidal Wave. No comment on that, at least not until I’ve seen this film.

From Sharknado director Anthony C. Ferrante and screenwriter Thunder Levin, Zombie Tidal Wave looks like it will offer up pure action as a small island town fights off wave after wave of zombies washing up on the beach.

When I was a kid we had to worry about used condoms and hypodermic needles washing up onto the sands. But zombies? What a way to ruin a perfect summer tourist season. 

“My early films were definitely horror,” said director Ferrante in an interview. “I wanted to see if we could subvert the zombie film with this. You’re not going to change the world with them. You’re not going to suddenly go, ‘We just came up with an idea that no one has done.’”

I am interested to see what this idea is. The director said these zombies cannot be killed. They cannot even be burned in a bonfire, as the toxic smoke is infectious. So how exactly will the humans in this film survive the tidal wave of zombies? 

It seems that in the zombie film genre the ancient wisdom of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes holds true: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. In that sense, the zombie in film is often much like a Greek drama, with the thrill coming not from the story but from the way the familiar tale is told. 

Ferrante, however, seems to be somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that film viewers might be “obsessed with the old.” The director concedes, however, that “you’ve got to be aware of what’s come before you and how they’ve done it well or not well.” In his interview, Ferrante compares his work with legendary predecessors such as George Romero, Dan O’Bannon, Lucio Fulci, and even John Carpenter.  

Now I’ve really got to see Zombie Tidal Wave to decide for myself if Ferrante’s zombie horror film can equal the masters he seems eager to both pay homage to and — if I can be bold enough to use the name of literary critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence — to overthrow.

Watch the trailer for Zombie Tidal Wave here.

Little Monsters Takes the Teacher Film into the Postapocalypse

A new zomcom from Australia is due out via the online streaming service Hulu sometime this year. Little Monsters has Nyong'o of Black Panther and Us fame playing a teacher who struggles to protect her children in the midst of a zombie outbreak during a school trip to a petting zoo. Not only is the teacher committed to protecting her students, but she strives to keep them from being frightened by the horror all around them. And it all depends upon keeping the children diverted with music.

Zombie Narrative Still Shuffling Ahead

The zombie narrative in film is far from dead. This is a piece of goodness recognized by Rafael Motamayor writing for BloodyDisgusting magazine.  Motamayor cites as proof the heart-wrenching drama of Cargo from Australia, the overwhelming rage of Overlord, the complexity of Rampant from Korea, and the ongoing pleasure of zomcom in Anna and the Apocalypse from Scotland and One Cut of the Dead from Japan as proof that decent zombie cinema is still being made both in Hollywood and around the world.

I'm not sure if we need to ask "why" the zombie narrative remains relevant, but I am glad to see that the juvenile mass market influence that has stained the genre both in film and print is facing noticeable pushback from directors around the world. To verify this I would add the French Canadian film The Ravenous (Les Affames) and the French film The Night Eats the World, and The Cured. Add to this the new zomcom film Zombiepura from Singapore (the nation's second zomcom film, though this one stirred up some controversy) and Zombiology from Hong Kong. I should also mention that a new zomcom has just begun production in India's Tamil Nadu state.

"Rosewater" is Absolute Brilliance

As well as being a captivating read, TadeThompson’s 2016 science fiction novel Rosewater has a awful lot to offer scholars interested in the zombie narrative and horror studies, as well as philosophers interested in ethics and what it means to be human.

Set in the “near future,” Thompson’s Rosewater follows the career of a psychic named Kaaro who has been recruited by “Section 45,” a secretive branch of the Nigerian government whose purpose is to gather information on an alien “entity” known as “Wormwood” that has literally invaded the planet. The narration begins years after the alien had in 2012 crash landed upon Hyde Park in London before burrowing into the depths of the planet where it would, like a cancer, metastasize throughout the planet’s mantle before sprouting, plantlike, in Nigeria—not far from the nation’s most populous city Lagos. This alien cancer metastases aboveground, as well. “It turned out this sentient being had seeded the entire biosphere with new macro- and microorganisms as a result, although it took decades for us humans to find out” (75). The alien forms an impenetrable biodome, around which grows the titular city of Rosewater. Within the dome are a host of alien species—Wormwood is not a single creature, but an entire biosystem of flora and fauna—and humans who have been caught within this strange alien colony.

If this is an extraterrestrial invasion narrative, the invaders seem rather benign and quite in contrast to the standard alien conquest narrative established by H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. The dome built by Thompson’s aliens provide Rosewater with an abundant supply of electrical power and a miraculous “healing” of the sick and injured who flock to the site for an annual-but-brief opening of a door into the alien territory. Like the faithful in attendance at Christian evangelical tent healings, the crowds that encircle the Wormwood dome are rapt with an awe that is best described as religious, although the dome is, “as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege” (12).

It is the gradual unraveling of the perception of the outside invader as a beneficent force that gives Thompson’s novel much of its narrative thrill, even as the ongoing rendering of Kaaro and his journey from street thug to high-performing secret agent embodies the book with a ceaselessly enjoyable narrative direction. Much of the pleasure is available thanks to Thompson’s sensitive caricature of Kaaro as a selfish and inconsiderate youth who slowly grows into a generous and compassionate adult. Thompson gradually reveals Kaaro’s weaknesses as his strengths, highlighting his protagonist’s tumble into a curmudgeonly cynicism that is halted by the arrival in his life of the charming Aminat, who would become his first encounter with the commitment of loving someone else. Through his love of Aminat, Kaaro would discover the heroic quality of self-sacrifice. “Aminat is a change in the equation an imbalance” (108).

Thompson also energizes the narrative flow by shifting between “then” and “now” as various (mis)adventures and encounters shape Kaaro’s life story and drive him to shed his selfish hedonism and take on the mantle of compassionate heroism.

Kaaro is a uniquely powerful “sensitive,” or psychic. His special ability—in addition to mind-reading, psychic control, and occasional glimpses of the future—is as a “finder” who can locate lost objects. “I begin to find things for people,” Kaaro says. “It is an obsession, compulsively done, with a strange, erotic need for completion. I find car keys, memories, heirloom brooches, squirreled-away money, PINs, mobile phones, photographs of loved ones, mathematical formulae, and spouses” (49).

But this street-smart Saint Anthony uses his abilities to not only find lost things, but to uncover hidden treasures as well as safe avenues of entry—and escape. “I do not plan to become a thief. It just happens naturally” (49). The teenaged Kaaro enjoys his ability to steal hidden treasures from any home because “I can buy things without having to ask or justify to my parents.” Kaaro uses his ill-gotten money “to purchase junk food, premium pornography, alcohol, lap dances, drugs, alcohol, clothes, shoes, alcohol and other dissipations.” The ability to steal is “sweet and fulfilling,” Kaaro notes. “Until you get caught” (50).  

Families in the small Lagosian suburb around the teenaged Kaaro’s house wonder how the thief has been plundering their carefully concealed hiding places stuffed with jewels and cash.  They eventually discover Kaaro, and attempt to bring upon him the mob’s justice in the smoking shape of the burning auto tire necklace. “No thief ever believes this is their destiny until there is a tyre around their neck and the petrol is wetting their hair, fumes choking their ability to cry out for mercy” (51). But even from this Kaaro can find the way out. His “sort-of-girlfriend” Fadeke is less fortunate. Wrongly assumed by the mob to be in partnership with Kaaro’s criminal acts, the vigilante mob turns on her as an outlet for their fury. Scholars interested in a psychoanalytical or even ethical reading of Kaaro have a source of study in this incident, as Fadeke’s death and Kaaro’s broken relationship with his family will become a source of emotional trauma and actual danger for the middle-aged psychic.

His regrets become both a weapon his enemies can use against him and a source of psychological self-healing. In an encounter awash with a sense of karmic justice, Kaaro becomes aware for the first time how his early life as a thief and hustler had ruined, even killed, a number of his victims. It will be his first real experience of guilt (228).

What Kaaro the youthful street hustler doesn’t expect is to be recognized as a “finder” and recruited by the government’s “S45” program, which trains him in how to use his psychic abilities for espionage, interrogation, and state security.

As noted above, this novel has a good deal to offer scholars eager to dive into the intricacies woven together by Thompson’s craft as an artist. Scholars of the Zombie Narrative may find interest in the phenomenon of the reanimates that wander the streets of Rosewater following the annual opening of the alien biodome’s portal. Not only is healing brought to the chronically ill and wounded who gather around the portal—though held back from entering the alien zone by soldiers who are more than willing to shoot to kill—but the dead are literally brought back to life. “Most of the graves around the camp are shallow,” and after the opening they empty themselves and send forth reanimated corpses. “Healed, hearts beting, eyes open, bodies warm, but no … life. No memories, no soul, no recognition of what they used to be” (87).

These alien-revived zombies roam the streets of Rosewater, even finding their way into distant cities. Most are harmless, but some reanimate with a chip on their shoulders. “When the dome brings a body back to life, sometimes it simply drools. And sometimes … it wakes up angry.” Filled with a rage that they then direct to everyone around them, these reanimates violently attack any and all who fall within their sight. “Scientists haven’t worked out what makes them go one way or the other,” Kaaro says. “I think it might have to do with temperament, some people being more aggressive than others. Or maybe … how they die” (33). The police and military are busy for weeks attempting to hunt down and “kill again” these reanimates, though many of the mindless undead elude capture and roam the back alleys of Rosewater for months after the opening.

It is the alien entity’s ability to “heal” and raise the dead that provides a source of thought for Zombie Narrative scholars. This healing comes about through the invasion and replacement of damaged human tissue with alien bioforms that replicate the human biology at the cellular level. This alien “invasion” is taking place at the cellular level, much like the various biological agents that zombify and drive the undead (or the living “infected”) in popular zombie fictions and films such as Mira Grant’s Feed, Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, or Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Literary scholars and philosophers alike will be inspired by the idea of cellular invasion and the location of subjectivity. At what point does a re-constructed individual tip from being human and becoming alien? What does the individual’s willingness to partake of this cellular transformation suggest about self-consciousness?

Thompson generously nourishes Rosewater with an abundance of ideas and arguments that deserve academic contemplation and comparison. For example, Thompson adopts George Romero’s willingness to set aside the abject aspect of the zombie and allow a sympathetic glimpse of the reanimated corpses that are set upon to satisfy the violent pleasures of street gangs and professional practice experiences of aspiring boxers.

Through the narrative voice of Kaaro, the author expresses a stronger astonishment or even contempt for the body horror of those who “experiment” with the healing powers of the biodome by “transforming” their own bodies.  These are “the reconstructed.” They differ from “the deformed,” those who have attended the opening seeking healing but have been “incorrectly” stitched together. One such example is a man with a “gigantic” goiter who had gone to the opening expecting it to shrink, but the healing alien forces incorrectly enlarge his goiter, accidentally striving for “bigger and better.”

“The healed are miraculous, the deformed a tragedy and the reanimates a horror, but the reconstructed are perhaps comedy or … whatever” (123). The reconstructed are those who seek to modify their normal human bodies, such as the man who “has latched hawk wings to cuts in his back,” which were then healed with muscle and blood vessels enough to allow the wings to function with life. “The wings are unimpressive but the man seems elated” (124). Many attempts at reconstruction end up in bizarre, even nightmarish forms. “There are men and women with multiple and displaced orifices, like a girl with two mouths, one above the other” who “tried to remodel her lips” (124). Such are the reconstructed who carry their bodies as evidence of “the grotesque changes they have brought upon themselves” (124).

Thompson flirts with this form of body horror enough to allow comparison with author Jeremy Robert Johnson who first displayed a fascination with the “altered” body horror in his debut novel Extinction Journals (2006) and continued to caress self-transformation as body horror in various disturbing ways throughout his dozen years of publication—most especially in his short stories “When Susurrus Stirs” and “The League of Zeroes” as well as within his 201 novel In the River. (It should be noted that Tade Thompson had garnered attention for his ability to write body horror with his 2017 novel The Murders of Molly Southbourne—though I’ve not yet read that text and will save it for a future review.)

Thompson’s novel Rosewater also provides a deep and dark pool within which scholars of Postcolonial Studies can dip their toes. The fertile source of this approach comes not only from the alien invasion narrative, but from the author’s placement of the plot in Nigeria. References abound to Nigeria’s experience as a former colonized nation and the nation’s contemporary infection by alien ideas such as rabid homophobia inspired by a Christian faith brought in by the former British colonial powers. Thompson also exposes structural remnants of imperial rule, from the potential despotism of the chief executive to the inequalities advanced by the upper echelons of a society shaped by class differences—including the violence of the elites as paralleled at the local level by the criminal class.  Indeed, as a nation that can still feel the former chains of colonization; the citizens of Nigeria are quick to become “unimpressed” by the idea of Wormwood as an invading power. “We’ve seen colonizers before, and they are similar, whether intercontinental or interplanetary” (225).

As a psychic, Kaaro is especially attuned to the lingering ghosts of Nigeria’s history as he navigates the “detritus of the nation’s communal consciousness.” He can almost feel history: “The blood and sweat of slaves in a stew of their own anguish … the guilt of slavers, the prolonged pain of colonization, the riots, the CIA interference, the civil war, the genocide of the Igbos, the tribal pogroms, the terrorism, the killing of innocents, the bloody coups, the rampant avarice, the oil, the dark blood of the country, the rapes, the exodus of the educated class …” (225).

Scholars interested in Game Theory, Virtual Reality, Hypnosis, and Dream Vision Narratives will also find in Rosewater a treasure of inspiring ideas worth pursuing. This comes through the novel’s absorbing exposure of Kaaro’s abilities as a “sensitive” and the connection between this psychic powers and the alien entity. Wormwood has infected the entirety of the earth’s atmosphere with “alien fungilike filments and neurotransmitters” that enmesh the earth and create a single communications platform—a spiderweb that sends signals back and forth around the world. “It is everywhere” and forms “multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin,” showing a special affinity for nerve endings that provide access to the human body’s central nervous system. “Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this xenosphere, is uploading information contantly, passively, without knowing” (76). Those with special abilities—“adepts” such as Kaaro—are able to access this “worldmind” (76).

The xenosphere, that “worldmind” or neural net, is similar to the contemporary realm of social media, where critical authority is too-often abandoned for a zombielike state of unquestioning acceptance. It is also a space of tremendous potential, “a psycho-field, a thoughtspace, essentially unstable” It is a space where “every notion can potentially become reality” (224). Is this similar to the “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories that find nourishing compost in our modern age of social media domination?

As Kaaro enters into the depths of this constructed space, going beyond his normal zone of comfort and protection, he witnesses the minds of “hundreds, thousands of people suspended unmoving … eyes rolling here and there or not at all.” This “school of human souls” is composed of “everybody who carelessly thinks or does not think.” They exist in the realm of the xenosphere “in the unprotected state, passive, oscitant, uncritical, naïve” (224).

One of Kaaro’s roles as a secret agent is the interrogation of “criminal” suspects, a task he approaches much like a modern-day Internet thieves and hackers engage in “phishing” methods to attain private data.  Using spoken trigger words, Kaaro remains open to the resulting thoughts and images flowing from the subjects of his interrogation. “My questions are racist, homophobic, and offensive in every way. This is my job” (110). Kaaro also holds a part-time job in bank security, using his abilities to “confuse” the xenosphere with his thoughts (while reading a novel) and muddy the water enough so that “wild” psychics are unable to pick up the passwords and data of bank customers. 

Kaaro can also heal those suffering from self-inflicted “attacks” of guilt within their subconscious. In one instance he deals with a woman whose “mind is a decaying temple” in which her deceased husband suffocates her with a vampiric grip that is anything but a lover’s embrace (155). Those who are unfamiliar with this method of healing see what Kaaro does as “a kind of exorcism,” imbuing him with a fearful mystical authority. The “religious people” dislike psychics such as Kaaro “because you challenge the concept of their various gods” as only deities can possibly “know the hearts of men” (275).

But this connection with the idea of supernaturalism is not the only reason why “adepts” are unpopular with even those in the highest levels of government. “Nobody should be able to do what you do,” Kaaro is told. “The mind is supposed to be the last sanctuary of a free human. Even prisoners are not meant to give up the sanctity of their thoughts. …There is bound to be resentment” (275). Here, then, may be another area of interest for scholarship and critical review of Rosewater. Scholarship in the philosophy of horror is richly interested in the human experience, consciousness, and what it means to “be” human. To that end Rosewater offers an intriguing starting point for this discussion, as both the connection of all minds to the alien xenosphere and the alteration of human bodies at the cellular level call into question the point at which the human ends and the alien begins.

Rosewater is meant to be a trilogy, to be followed by The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption—this last being a turn against alien imperialism. 

Rosewater, meanwhile, ends with the ongoing, slow “invasion” of earth, a terraforming of sorts that may well result in humanit becoming “full xeno.” But much like the great majority of citizens in today’s developed nations who see Global Warming as a crisis that is either unstoppable or best left for later generations to deal with, the citizens of Thompson’s Rosewater likewise “think we’ll be dead and gone by the time the carnage begins.” But then again, that may be wishful thinking. As Kaaro considers the future conquest of earth, he intuits that “we will all have front row seats” (390).

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