Hunger & Thirst by Claire Fuller: book review
It's 1987 and Ursula wants out of the halfway house she's living in. After a series of foster parents and children's homes, at sixteen, Ursula is ready to be in charge of her own life. She has a job delivering the post at an arts school and is moving into a squat with the boyfriend of her new friend, Sue. Things are turning around for Ursula, though everyone is weary of this house they call the Underwood. The place was abandoned and deemed unsellable since it was a murder house. Seeing this as a minor inconvenience in exchange for free rent, Vince and Ursula move in and start hosting their friends in the perfectly preserved home.
But strange things start happening. Vibrant, energetic Sue encourages Ursula to be more daring, stealing art tools from the school and filling her head with dreams of moving to America. Ursula gets a taste of family life when she's introduced to Sue's huge family and gets folded into their caring arms. But then it all goes wrong. There's something evil lurking in the house, a parasite or disease that makes the inhabitants lose their minds. Sue disappears, and it's unclear who was involved, Vince has a breakdown, Ursula is convinced she killed her best friend, and life disintegrates. Years later, when Ursula has made a successful artistic career out of the spotlight, a documentary maker reopens the case that haunted their teenage years, spelling disaster for a group of people just trying to move on.
I couldn't put this one down. It proved to be much more horror-leaning than I'd expected. I thought it would be more in line with Penance by Eliza Clark, a retrospective look at the real truth behind a (fake) true crime case. Instead, the book gets extremely twisty as Ursula recalls the events of 1987. It's hard to grasp what her actual experiences are against what's the early signs of a mental health episode. There's a lot of aspects of the unreliable narrator at play. This interesting and twisty, but it's also a hard trick to pull off because, at times, I wasn't sure what was confusing because of Ursula's experiences being strange and hard to describe and what came from a fault in the mechanics of the writing. The book became increasingly hard to follow, and it felt like the last 100 pages were somewhat messy in their time jumps fast forwarding us through decades to show the complete fallout of the year at the Underwood. One thing I struggled with in the novel is that even though it has a retrospective framing—this idea we're going to unspool the events and truly understand what happened—no understanding is ever given. The book ends on a cliffhanger and the concrete facts of what actually happened beyond each individual's speculation is left untold. I'm not confident the author even knows what happened. In this way, while the set-up feels like a mystery, there is nothing to solve.
While it's never outright scary, the book did leave me with an unsettled feeling. This seemed to be what it was trying to achieve. I don't typically read much of this genre but saw a great review on bookstagram and decided to pick it up. I feel so torn about it. I wanted to keep reading, to learn more about the inhabitants of the Underwood. Each character was deeply compelling, and Fuller does a good job of building up their intersecting backstories, creating an investment in the reader. Unfortunately, as the story develops, this level of depth is somewhat abandoned as the plot and the vibes seem to get the better of her craft. Still, I was engaged right up to the end.
Despite this being a very different book, I would recommend it to fans of Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. They share the thread of an artistic main character and dark, creepy, unsettling vibes that still say closer to the literary side than true horror, accessible to readers who usually struggle with the full on gore or scare tactics.
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