The Ones Who Come Back Hungry
The Ones Who Come Back Hungry
We stare at each other. My sister, who doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe. She’s not alive. But that thing that came flailing after me last night... it wasn’t either.
“We can’t do that,” I protest.
“Why not?” she snaps. “He’s obviously dangerous!”
“We can help him! We have to at least try!”
“Right.” She scoffs. “Like you’re helping me?”
The bitterness of the words, the implied air quotes, carry all the breathtaking sting of a slap. It’s a moment before I can speak.
“Yeah. Helping you.” I pick the syllables out one by one. Anger blooms in Technicolor splotches at the edges of my vision. “I’ve spent every spare minute trying to figure out how. I’m keeping you going with my own blood.”
She tilts a look at me from under her eyebrows as if to say I’m proving her point. “Uh-huh. And you’re planning to do all of that stuff that’s so hard for someone else too. For Cole fucking Strickland.”
“Well, yeah!” I cry, as she turns away. “We could at least take him to his family, to someone who can--”
“Like who?” Audrey demands. “You think his dad would have given him blood, when he couldn’t even be bothered to visit him in the hospital when he was a kid? Who else do you think would be down for that? Lauren? Or do you figure that was her job?”
I stutter, trying to find something to say, but I don’t have an answer. She knows I don’t. Her shoulders droop.
“Get some equipment together, okay? A wooden stake, or whatever it is we need.”
“It’s not that simple!” I’m floundering now, reaching for rejoinders, which tells me I’ve already lost this argument. “There’s like ten different ways to kill every creature I’ve looked up. How do we know what will actually work?”
“Trial and error,” Audrey says coldly. “Something has to.”
The Ones Who Come Back Hungry, a horror novel about sisters Jo and Audrey, focuses on the grief of losing a sibling and the weight of keeping secrets that you might not believe yourself.
Jo’s older sister, Audrey, seems perfect in every way. She is academic, athletic, and keeps everyone in her circle—her family, friends, and boyfriend—busy with her schedule. That is why it comes as such a shock when she suddenly gets sick, and, as suddenly, dies. Jo and her parents are left reeling, and small fractures begin to show in the family as they isolate themselves in their grief. Jo thinks it is this grief that leads her to become paranoid about the footsteps in the snow circling her house and may be the cause of the visions of the person she sees in the backyard that she swears is Audrey. As it turns out, it isn’t grief that makes Audrey appear in Jo’s life, but a supernatural disease that has turned her deceased older sister into a vampire-like being. There is only one way to keep Audrey “alive”: human blood that is willingly given to her.
The premise of The Ones Who Come Back Hungry is unique and in a genre that many young readers are eager to dive into. However, the pacing of the novel is inconsistent, and the plot points rarely had me desperate to read more. A lot of the content that is supposed to give you goosebumps or keep you up at night felt predictable, and even though I am a novice horror reader and self-admittedly scared quite easily, I never felt unnerved at the vampire storylines. Readers may cling to the messy relationships in the plot (Jo kisses Audrey’s boyfriend! Audrey’s friends keep asking Jo to join their hang outs out of pity, and Jo overhears these conversations!), but I am not sure they will be truly drawn to the horror aspect of it all.
One of the strengths of this novel is the note about content at the start of the text. It outlines any content warnings that may be necessary (such as sibling death, anxiety about disease/germs, self-harm, and more) as well as an intriguing commentary about the horror genre itself. The author notes that “[t]he key to enjoying horror is exploring it from a place of safety”, and ensuring that setting and keeping boundaries while reading horror is part of what keeps these novels fun. While I did not find the content particularly gory or upsetting – mind you, this is not a complaint as this is rarely the genre I reach for! – I think the content note can open an incredibly important conversation for young adult horror fans.
The Ones Who Come Back Hungry would likely sit on the shelves of my classroom library or quickly be returned after being borrowed.
Lindsey Baird is a high school English teacher on Treaty 7 Territory in Southern Alberta. She recently completed her M. Ed in Critical Studies in Education.