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The Fervor
by Alma Katsu
G.P. Putnam's Sons, $27.00, 320pp
Published: April 2022

This is only my second Alma Katsu novel, after 'The Hunger', but a number of things seem clear to me at this point. She writes historical horror but adapts her prose to the era she's exploring. She likes to shine a light on taboo subjects, whatever the reasons behind the taboo. And she breaks up her story between a set of characters but presents those perspectives to us in such a way that we can easily combine them into a coherent story. What's more, that story unfolds and wraps up perfectly well but somehow always ends up subservient to the history. She makes sure that the horrors of the era are even more abiding to us than the horrors of the story.

Last time—at least for me but she's published two other standalone novels in between—she took us on a journey down the Oregon Trail to California in 1846 with the Donner Party. This time, she takes aim at a more topical taboo, that of racism, because it's 1944, the United States has been part of World War II for three years and has confined its resident Japanese population to internment camps; even when, in the case of Meiko Briggs, one of the lead characters, her American husband is fighting for the Allies as a pilot in the US Air Force.

She's locked up in Camp Minidoka in Idaho, along with her daughter Aiko, who was born in Seattle to a pair of American citizens. They constitute one of the three primary plot strands and arguably the most important, because whatever goes horribly wrong in 1944 is going particularly horribly wrong in Camp Minidoka. Some sort of disease is spreading through the camp and accelerating from a mild cold to an increasingly violent madness, a blood frenzy that strikes apparently at random, with even the calmest inmates turning viciously on their loved ones.

The second plot strand features a journalist named Fran Gurstworld in Ogallala, Nebraska, who's keen on exploring a story that everyone else tells her doesn't exist. She discovers something around the lake that apparently fell out of the sky, but her boss doesn't want her to dig into it, mostly because doing so would likely highlight that they're having an affair and he has no intention of letting his wife into that secret. Fran persists anyway, because she's a good journalist with good instincts, even though her job is literally not going to be there when she comes back from this particular investigation.

The final strand is Revd. Archie Mitchell, a priest in Bly, Oregon who's widowed by a blast from another of the things falling from the sky, this time something that took his entire family from him in one large explosion. Unlike Meiko or Fran, or even Aiko who has her own part to play, Archie is a coward. He knows what the right thing usually is, which is helpful for a priest, but he also finds it difficult to do that right thing, especially against the odds. And the odds are stacked against him when he learns just how many people in his parish are absolutely not doing the right thing, because they're fundamentally racist.

It took a long while for 'The Hunger' to leave history for horror, but that's not the case here. That blast that took Archie's family happens in the first chapter and it's neatly horrific, even before we factor in a tiny translucent spider that will creep the heck out of a lot of readers. Clearly spiders play a part here, but so do army experiments and Japanese demons, none of which connect initially because Katsu has a deep and abiding wish for us to question what's going on and try to figure it all out before she tells us. Of course, she'll bring the plot strands together, but that won't happen for the majority of the book, a side note being that "the fervor" isn't even mentioned as such until page 202.

I found all this fascinating. As with 'The Hunger', I knew a little about most of the elements that Katsu combines into a fictional story, but not as much as she explores. I learned things here, about Japanese internment camps—I've been part of a feature shot in one of those here in Arizona; yokai, a wild array of spirits that pervade Japanese culture; and the lengths to which the military will go in order to gain an advantage. What's telling is that the dark history here isn't all in the past; those parishioners in Bly belong to the Loyal Sons of the Republic, the sort of organisation that's been frustratingly active over the past few years in the US.

And that's where the true value here is, I believe. It's a good historical horror novel, a truer and more diligent one than 'The Hunger', which was a historical novel far more than it was ever horror. However, it ably highlights not only historical horror and supernatural horror but contemporary horror, because we can't help but extrapolate events to the modern day. What would happen if the US entered the war in Ukraine and Russians truly became the Evil Empire again? What would happen if Kim Jong-un sent a nuclear missile our way? Would we avoid the mistakes of the past or find new justifications for them to be repeated? It doesn't take much to translate the Loyal Sons of the Republic into the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys and they don't even need the excuse of war with a foreign nation to do what they do.

So this tale of horror becomes still more horrific as we extrapolate it forward. I still appreciated what it does in 1944 and what the characters do. It's easy to like Meiko and Aiko, as needless victims caught up in something much bigger than they are, especially when they take matters into their own hands, both together and separately. It's easy to like Fran too, a dedicated newshound with a nose for the truth and the courage to seek it out no matter what. It's a lot harder to like Archie, the coward that he is, but he's able to find (shock horror) some redemption, and I think I ended up enjoying him as a character, if not as a human being, all the more because of that.

'The Fervor' is a new novel, released in April in hardcover, while 'The Hunger' is four years old now. The two novels in between are 'The Deep' and 'Red Widow', the former of which is a historical horror, being a look at the sinking of the Titanic from a fresh supernatural angle. I must say that I'm more intrigued by the latter, as it's the first in a new series of spy thrillers and Katsu spent three and a half decades as a senior intelligence analyst for TLAs like the CIA and the NSA. Clearly she has direct expertise to bring to bear in that genre that she can't have with the Titanic or the Oregon Trail, even if she can speak well to Japanese internment camps indirectly from a single generation adrift. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Alma Katsu click here

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