Hunger is a book that I was looking forward to reading. The premise is simple enough: a teenage girl in her first year of university wakes from her slumber one morning, only to find out she has accidentally desecrated an ancient burial site in an episode of sleepwalking, and the events that follow irrevocably change the lives of her and her three housemates. This seemingly interesting plot, coupled with critically acclaimed novelist Melvin Burgess, led me to believe I was in for a literary treat. Instead, I was met by a cornucopia of fantasy/horror tropes and generic characters that could have been pulled from any horror story from the last thirty years.
For the first half of the book, Burgess doesn't seem to know what he wants from the story. His omniscient narrator switches register and tone constantly, which I understand is him half-heartedly trying to use polyphony (as there is no singular protagonist), though like almost all of the techniques he employs in the novella, it falls flat. This polyphony is the cause of many inconsistencies in writing style which just end up as awkward attempts at delving further into the psyche of whatever particular character we have the pleasure of following at this particular moment by emulating their choice of language. This leads to hypophora-ridden conversations with Jesus, random and unnecessary expletives, and vaguely philosophical rhetorical questions with no relevance to the story.
There were several other, smaller issues that I had with the book, such as the unnecessarily sexual subplots, where it seemed that every character's endgame was to have someone in their bed, regardless of how much danger they were in. This may be typical of horror, though when realism is the main goal, it detracts from the grittiness of the story for a cheap page of entertainment.
Another thing that surprised me about Hunger is how bland and almost childlike Burgess's writing was. After hearing so much praise for him and seeing how long his career was, I expected more from him than page after page of simple sentences with hardly any flow between them. The way some twists in the story that should have been huge were tossed aside like a piece of dialogue used simply to crank up the word count was atrocious.
A final negative I will mention is the main antagonist (as there are several throughout), Alghol. Alghol is a four thousand year old demon from Arabia, though he speaks like a middle aged Englishman. He's boring, generic and could be compared to every villain from Darth Vader to Voldemort.
Despite all of this, when Burgess can bring himself to write more than the bare minimum he can write some beautifully descriptive images, vividly portraying Manchester and its surrounding areas, through accounts of derelict houses, crowded bars, gargantuan libraries and near-abandoned caravan parks. His best moments come in the form of many tense action sequences, though these don't quite make up for the sheer amount of filler used in between these.
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