I read Alma Katsu’s last novel, The Hunger, because it was about the Donner Party’s fate. I knew going in things were going to be bad for the Donners and the families that followed them out west; slow starvation, ill-planning, and death buried in the snow-covered mountains. What I was not expecting was the horror Katsu created in such a constricted narrative. She was magically able to thread superstitious doubt, panic, and fear in a way that made reading the ill-fated journey less of an exercise in schadenfreude and more nail-biting. I am still scared when I think of passages in that book, so my anticipation for her latest novel, The Deep concerning the fates of the RMS Titanic and her sister ship the HMHS Britannic was palpable to say the least.
Both ships go down within four years of each other, and both sank due to the hubris of men enthralled by capitalism and war. While I may not know the history here as well as I did with The Hunger, I know Katsu is up against the challenge of reader expectations. The Deep is a strong novel and though tackling a historical tragedy so profoundly embedded in our cultural memory, it manages to build tension about exactly how the tragedy will unfold. As with The Hunger doubt, terror, and superstition haunt the characters and equalize them across the economic divisions that the Titanic made so clear. In The Deep, Katsu delivers another novel with a refreshing take on a story well-told. Read more
