Unexplained noises, flickering lights, gut-churning odours, eating flies, bite marks on pale skin, missing tools, an abandoned house… Hunger & Thirst by Claire Fuller is loaded with gothic elements.

So gothic isn’t a go-to genre for me. I picked up this book because I’ve enjoyed Fuller’s work in the past. It tells the story of sixteen-year-old Ursula, who finds herself with a new job in the post room of a local art school and a bed in a halfway house, after years of being in the care system. With her ‘new life’ comes new friends, including charismatic Sue, who takes Ursula under her wing and invites her to join a squat at The Underwood, a house abandoned after the owners met a terrible end.

I sat on my bed looking at her drawing of me on my plaster cast, wondering if she was my friend now and whether that meant she would let me down.

The story moves between Ursula at age sixteen and the present, when she is a renowned sculptor living under a pseudonym. When her identity is exposed by a true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance, the events of Ursula’s time at The Underwood are revealed.

There are dozens of ways of managing trauma in fiction. Sometimes it’s in the background, casting a shadow on events; sometimes it’s a slow-reveal as particular things happen; and sometimes it’s referred to in a very straightforward way, so that the reader does not have to join any dots. Fuller has gone with the later in this novel. The trauma is overt and, in combination with the gothic elements, a little too obvious for my liking. I think most readers who would pick up a book by Fuller, would be relatively trauma-literate, and don’t need things ‘explained’. Nor do they need stereotypes and generalisations, and Ursula, as a person who has received little care in her life and is positioned as a murderer (that’s not a spoiler), the trope seems convenient and even lazy.

Ursula’s trauma history is also explored through the theme of ‘hunger’. As a child, Ursula was hungry – for food and for love. Again, Fuller uses this a little too obviously – scenes at Sue’s family dinner table where Ursula feels welcomed contrast with her insecurities dining out with friends, and fear when she was a child and had no food. For example, in one scene at a restaurant, a colleague insults Ursula, saying, ‘Were you brought up by monkeys or gorillas, or what?’

Lastly, and perhaps this reveals my lack of reading in this genre (and the genre of psychological suspense), the pacing of the story didn’t feel quite right. There’s a big reveal halfway through and after that, the tension falters.

What did I like? Ursula’s evolution as a sculptor.

2.5/5

The food kept coming and I kept eating: crab rarebit on a crumpet, roasted halibut with homemade black pudding, creamed leeks and truffle emulsion, a choux bun with spiced pumpkin custard, yogurt sorbet, praline sauce. Food I didn’t know existed.