Alma Katsu, author of historical horror novels like The Hunger (2018) and The Deep (2020), returns to the genre in her latest The Fervor (releasing on April 26, 2022). Like her other novels, The Fervor centers on a main historical event, playing with the timeline and details ever so much. This time, readers are placed in 1940s America during Japanese internment, a time when American exceptionalism, isolationism, and, of course, xenophobia ran rampant. The links to our current cultural moment are pretty plain on the page. Like us, the characters are wrestling with a strange communicable illness thought to originate from Asia, and they witness a marked increase in the attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in response. Unlike Covid-19 and the increased violence against AAPI people in the States and around the world, the sickness, “The Fervor,” is one part Japanese mythos and another part experimental bioweapon.
The Fervor reads differently than Katsu’s other historical horrors. In fact, I don’t know if it is quite horrific as much as it is weird. Weird fiction is no stranger to elements of folk horror that can come paired with virulent racism. Critics tend to contort in ways that both acknowledge that the field grows from the racial animus of writers like H. P. Lovecraft and, at the same time, try to claim that he is not the be-all-end-all of weird fiction. (He’s not, thankfully.) However, Katsu doesn’t spend tons of time on the folk horror side of this equation, instead showcasing the infectiousness of hatred, violence, and complacency of otherwise benevolent people. I am thankful that Katsu lends her touch to shed light on one of the great American domestic atrocities. Yet, I feel a palpable pull in the book to support an ideal American identity, which views its institutions as inherently good, despite trying to show, very overtly, that in 2022 we are not too far from the book’s grim reality.
In the afterword, Katsu admits that The Fervor should serve as a mirror to our current cultural moment. With her background as an “analyst for the Federal government,” Katsu reflects on becoming familiar with the social destabilization of other nations by way of coups, assassinations, and genocide. She admits to her own misguided belief that events like these “may have been possible elsewhere but would never happen in America.” As a result, The Fervor is designed to show readers that we are indeed dangerously close to this reality. We are moments away from living in a country where a mother and daughter are forced into internment due only to their racial background, where a preacher is involved in a radical hate group wrapped in a distorted American flag, and where a woman must battle uphill against sexism in the office. The Fervor successfully challenges its readers to address our own selective memories of past atrocities that are “now back with a sickening vengeance.” Some, however, would argue that in order to be back, these nefarious ideologies would have had to have left in the first place. The problem is, depending on who you are, such a life already is and has been real here for a while now.
Jorogumo
Please don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Katsu’s writing and I think that the story following Meiko and Aiko is compelling, tragic, and worth the read alone. The backdrop of Japanese folklore is fascinating, and the Jorōgumo is a terrifying supernatural beastie. My critiques of the novel do not overshadow this main point, nor do they seek to invalidate the real connection Katsu has to Japanese internment and Japanese culture. As a reader, I am thrilled that she continues to produce horror that is intimately linked to historical events that can help us understand the mess we find ourselves in now. She is an orb weaver of a writer and that talent shows here in The Fervor. But some threads do seem to be loose. Namely, I felt that The Fervor does not explore concretely enough how this yōkai imagery is internalized, what it represents, and how it festers into the consciousness of those who know of it, or have forgotten it. Sure, there are spiders being force-fed to characters (truly horrific), there are moments of uncertainty and reality bending that need to occur in anything supernatural, and there are certainly past traumas that haunt characters. The main problem for me as a reader is that these elements feel disconnected from the victims of the events at Minidoka. In short, I feel that there is very little folk in this folk horror.
Many of the Japanese American characters are in the background of the novel, or play tertiary roles. The novel spends a good chunk of the first quarter of the book in the Minidoka camp but that falls away quickly as Archie and Fran’s narratives develop. During the set-up of the novel, I was primed to see how folk horror was used to convey injustice, or to represent the perhaps forgotten or repressed cultural identity of those in the camp, the tensions between Japanese American citizens like Meiko who married a white serviceperson and their peers. There are hints to that last one in the novel, but it fades away as the action increases.
What does come across effectively is that, like the Jorōgumo , hatred is seductive. Its venom erodes the person it seeps into, changing and breaking what was once decent into a human husk. The descriptions in the book of person-to-person violence are visceral. Groups of infected rally behind a vast governmental shadow agency fueled to act against those who, on any other day, could be counted in a national census. Here The Fervor leans into the social horror of life. Katsu guides her readers to realize how we are only a tweet away from similar chaos and bloodshed. The novel shines in these moments as paranoia and violence rend communities and families apart.
Such violence continues pretty much until the end of the novel where it is suppressed by a group of benevolent and well-intentioned government officials. In its conclusion, hatred is present, but diminished due, in part, to the valiant efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Fran. By the last line, one Japanese woman, her mixed-race daughter, a reporter, a redeemed preacher recovering from his wife’s death, and the promise of the federal government listening to these voices save the day. Maybe Katsu is more hopeful about structural power than I am at this point. Maybe some of those spiders found their way to me and made me cynical. I don’t know. I do think that The Fervor just muddies the waters a bit when it comes to linking exceptionalism with violent nationalism while at the same time highlighting an American identity that remains only aspirational.
More than her other historical novels, The Fervor gives readers a lot to digest as they follow the links between the social horrors in a post-war America and what, historically, many view as distant past. What I appreciate the most about Katsu’s The Fervor is that it is unrelenting in its commentary on our current political and social world. She is a master of cultivating emotional investment, and it shows as we follow Aiko’s side of the narrative as she and those around her experience brutal acts of racial violence. The Fervor reads as incredibly personal, timely, and as a stark warning to readers.
As with The Deep and The Hunger, it’s clear that a lot of research goes into a book like this. The value of Katsu’s writing is wrapped up with her ability to excavate historical events we tend to shelve, inject them with just enough supernatural terror, and then leave them to readers to explore on their own. I read more about the Donner party after The Hunger than I would have originally. Ditto goes for wrestling with the ways the Wendigo folklore may or may not fit into that overall plot. It was an obsession. That exciting historical detective work is at play here as well—I feel like I desperately need to look up more about the Fu-Go balloon bombs, the Jorōgumo and other yōkai and, sadly, with a part of American history that I am woefully not aware of besides pop culture representations. Katsu’s power resides in her use of a type of horror that motivates analysis. Horror in her novels becomes an aid to exploration—it hooks and challenges us to explore and understand its source material. For this aspect alone, readers should always turn to Katsu’s brand of horror and, if they do, they won’t be disappointed with The Fervor.
**This was a review of an Advanced Proof of The Fervor provided by Putnum.
See Kyle’s review of Alma Katsu’s The Deep here.
Kyle Brett, Ph.D., studies nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. He is also a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader, and you can follow him on Twitter @burntcheerios. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Alma Katsu’s novel, The Deep, It, Cargo, Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians, and Sea Fever and the working-class weird
