Owen Banner's Those Who Hunger: An Amish Vampire Thriller, in the sort of short form plot summary that often adorns book covers or online product descriptions, sounds like a surefire winner of a supernatural thriller. In the green hills of rural Pennsylvania, a teenager is found violently mauled to death in an underpass. Haddassah Zook is the lone keeper of the dark secret of what happened to the dead boy. However, Hadassah is not the only one keeping secrets in the tightly knit Amish community, which harbors a population of "marked ones", who bear a Biblical curse of vampirism. As the body count rises, all of this secrecy threatens to destroy not only the Zook family, but the entire Amish settlement. The cloistered community now facing grave threats from both internal dangers, and the outsider FBI agents tasked with investigating the bizarre murders. The book's prose is delightfully atmospheric, and shows there was some careful research into the local color of the central Pennsylvania town where the majority of the story is set. The central conceit of the austere Amish lifestyle being a penance for the vampiric curse of the descendants of Cain is a very clever take, and marries two disparate elements ( and vampires) in a way that feels fresh and organic for the book's universe. While teenage Hadassah (nicknamed Haddie) Zook is our principle protagonist, the large cast of characters both in the Zook family and the wider Amish village at hand are distinct enough that it doesn't become a chore to keep track of the denizens and their relationships. What squanders Those Who Hunger's initial promise are some serious issues with plotting, pacing and character development.  The main plot is set in motion by an unpleasant and mostly unnecessary sexual assault. Haddie discovers her vampiric nature when a local boy attempts to rape her, and her cursed abilities manifest in a bloody murder of her assailant. None of this is addressed in any significant manner other than as a source of guilt for Haddie, as her keeping secret both her status as a vampire and the murder itself is essential to the plot. Considering that every other character in the book manifests the curse in a less hackneyed manner, the oversight of Haddie's trauma being the sympathetic plight in the situation casts an unpleasant pall over the proceedings. While the members of the Zook family and their dynamic amongst the Amish community are nicely fleshed out, the book bogs down what was a rather tight thriller about all of the ties that bind us together, with far too many secondary characters and thinly sketched side plots. The introduction of police procedural (the FBI agents) and coming of age (Haddie's Chicago Rumspringa/search for her lost older brother) elements adds several hundred pages of complications to the book's 625 page length, but little in the way of intrigue or insight. Overall, Those Who Hunger: An Amish Vampire Thriller has some excellent foundational and thematic elements, but collapses under the weight of what was perhaps an excess of conceptual ambition. Sadly, this leaves what could have been a very intriguing thriller (given a much tighter edit) buried in the rubble. Review by G.G. Graham   the heart and soul of horror review websitesComments are closed.
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