The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen #bookreview #TheBlackHunger #NetGalley

A spine-tingling, queer gothic horror debut where two men are drawn into an otherworldly spiral, and a journey that will only end when they reach the darkest part of the human soul.
“The Black Hunger is a bleak, gothic masterpiece. A devastating exploration of humanity’s capacity for evil.”​ – Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters
John Sackville will soon be dead. Shadows writhe in the corners of his cell as he mourns the death of his secret lover and the gnawing hunger inside him grows impossible to ignore.
He must write his last testament before it is too late.
It is a story steeped in history and myth – a journey from stone circles in Scotland, to the barren wilderness of Ukraine where otherworldly creatures stalk the night, ending in the icy peaks of Tibet and Mongolia, where an ancient evil stirs.

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Hi and welcome to my review of The Black Hunger!

Cover love at first sight let me to read the synopsis which tickled me even more and before I knew it, I’d clicked that request button. Unfortunately, my actual reading experience with The Black Hunger was a mixed bag at best, a let-down at worst.

The Black Hunger is a book of very distinctive parts, and the first part just didn’t work for me. It provides the base and the history for the rest of the story, but honestly, I would have preferred the author to cut right to the chase, because I really struggled and if I were the kind of reader to DNF, I would have. The pace was slow and the chapter long. It drones on for about 80 pages without paragraphs, which I hope is a formatting issue that will be fixed in the final edit, although it doesn’t look like it. Moreover, it deals with quite a bit of dense Asian history / myth / religion, which I’m happy to explore to broaden my horizons, but the manner in which it’s presented just didn’t gel with me and didn’t allow me to immerse myself into this new-to-me territory. If anything, it felt never-ending and I lost interest along the way.

Starting the second part, which consists of letters and diary entries, I felt like I started a whole new book. The pace picks up, the main chapter is divided into smaller, more easily digestible parts, and I finally got a whiff of the horror I was supposedly reading. (Admittedly, there was some of that in the first part, mentioning the lore of the hungry ghosts, but it got lost in all the other information that I was meant to process).

Just when I’d got into the swing of things, reading that second part, I was yanked out of it again when I started the next part. Clearly, long and long-winded chapters don’t work for me. I sorta felt like I was reading a transcript of a uni lecture, an endless monologue. And I just lost interest again and never became fully invested. Judging by the many five-star ratings on Goodreads, many people have adored this book, but for me, it was mostly a struggle, and by the end, my brain was exhausted. I really wanted to love this book, it seemed right up my street, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

The Black Hunger is out in digital and audio formats on 8 October and paperback on 10 October.

Thanks to Orbit and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions are my own.