Even with my experiences reading Lee’s earlier novel The Conjoined (a woman finds the bodies of two foster children in her recently deceased mother’s freezer) as well as the more recent experience of reading Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell (a new mother deals with everyday racism and mental illness), I somehow did not expect this book to be so bleak and dark. The story covers five generations of Alice’s family: Gigi (a comfort woman in China during WWII), Gigi’s daughter Bette, Bette’s daughter Judy, Alice, and Alice’s daughter Luna. I have never read a book that so incisively tells a story of those “haunted by the past”.

The writing impressed me. It’s been a long time since I read The Conjoined, but I think a side-by-side comparison would show clear growth in The Hunger We Pass Down. It completely sucked me in while building gloomy tension, growing more foreboding as the story progressed.

The embroidered peonies, once pink, were now an unsettling fleshy colour, the shade of skin that had never been seen in direct light, that folded in on itself in secret.

The Hunger We Pass Down, pg 81

The speculative horror elements take time to reveal themselves, but even before the reader gets the full picture, plenty of moments invoke a sense of dread. The supernatural horror becomes more real as the story progresses.

***spoilers in the next section re the story’s conclusion***

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The reveal of what actually happened to Alice’s father when he died was unexpected for me. The ending also shocked me in a way that I haven’t experienced from a book in a long time. I was not expecting the turn to physical violence. It left me in a reading coma for a couple days. That felt like Real Horror – sad and tragic with no sense of hope at all.

Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the perspective shift with the conclusion being from Luna’s POV. I’m not arguing argainst portraying the sad, bleak regression that Luna experiences at the close of the book, but I would have liked a little more resolution from Alice’s POV since the bulk of the book follows her experience. Still, I can begrudgingly accept the storytelling point made with this shift.

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***end spoilers**

💭 The Bottom Line: An exemplar of the striking stories being told in contemporary horror today, The Hunger We Pass Down offers a devastating read about one family of women’s experience with intergenerational trauma and family demons.

Have you read any family-focused horror lately?