Fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will find familiar and welcome chills. The members of the party come to suspect that shape-changers are responsible for the carnage, and they encounter increasing challenges to their survival. In one place, one of Donner’s teenage daughters finds hundreds of such letters, all with the ominous message: “Turn back or you will die.” Then a young boy disappears and is later found savagely mutilated, as if by an animal. Those headed west often leave letters under rocks in the hope that an eastbound traveler will retrieve them and take them to the nearest post office. Based on a true story, the disappearance of a large wagon train heading west towards California in the mid-1840s, Alma Katsu has made a superb job of recreating. George Donner is leading a wagon train to California. “What looked like a human vertebra, cleaned of skin” and a “scattering of teeth” lie outside in the snow. In the prologue, set in April 1847, a team of rescuers sets out to find the last survivor of the expedition, Lewis Keseberg, but they locate only his abandoned cabin. Katsu ( The Taker) injects the supernatural into this brilliant retelling of the ill-fated Donner Party.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |