A great mix of genres that kept me turning pages: creepy, intriguing, enthralling. I loved the storytelling and the world building.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

DNF @13% not because I didn't find anything interesting with the story but because I'm not currently in the mood for gothic horror.

Thank you Netgaley/Orbit for the ARC.

I don't fully know how to put this into words but The Black Hunger unfurls in a way I have not seen a story do in quite some time, reading this book truly felt like peeling an onion, the layers!! The attention to detail, the atmosphere, the winding twisting story and the adventure the characters go on and the slow creeping discomfort were all incredible in my opinion. I don't wish to spoil anything but the antagonists in this book were nothing like I expected and pulled on mythology and legends in a way I've not seen before in the best way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Though I will say this is not one for those that like succinct writing Pullen is an extremely descriptive writer which I personally like but appreciate that many people do not. It was a little slow at times, and I would have loved it to be split up into more chapters. I will also say, I did not like John, I somewhat suspect this was intentional as he was indeed a rather pampered individual suddenly thrust into the midst of chaos but he was rather irritating. That being said I loved so many of the other characters so my dislike of John is not a reflection on the story or Pullen's writing

Thank you to both Little Brown Book Group and Nicholas Pullen for providing me access to this eARC!

First I would like to say thank you to Little, Brown Book Group and NetGalley for giving me access to an e-arc.
I don't always remind people to check trigger warnings and reviews of books... but this book I feel it's necessary to make a note of this. The triggers are extensive in this book!
Things that I loved/enjoyed about this book... the initial location is local to where I live. It was fun to read a book set in places I can visualise well because I know them in real life. On top of that, the description and world building was impeccable in this. Until later in the book where it bordered on overly extensive. I am also a sucker for educational environments in fiction along with beautiful travel scenes and a beautiful romance and some gorgeous friendships too. The "bad guys" were unique and well written... I really enjoyed the tension that built between the "good guys" and "bad guys". I would recommend the audio too as there are a lot of words that the audio helps with the pronunciation of. Both the writing and the audio have been produced really well. Including different accents and voices to distinguish between characters and locations well. Although, there isn't a lot of time spent on he travelling between places, you visit so many places within the story that you will feel like you've been around the world in 80 days... in a good way. It's very atmospheric and the tension builds deliciously. I also felt that it could be considered a retelling of Genghis Khan to some degree too. There was a lot of religious and cultural concepts mentioned that I ended up googling to see if they were inspired by history.
I also, really appreciated the mental health description and representation.
Things I didn't enjoy were the lack of chapters... it was split into parts, but the parts were long and I personally prefer to have chapters. I also got confused when the pov changed... it wasn't as clear as it could have been at first. I also didn't particularly appreciate that the only people that accepted queerness were the bad guys.

I want to try Black Hunger again at a later date, because it’s very well-written, and it’s utilizing Buddhist…folklore? Not sure if that’s the right term. My point is, I don’t read books featuring Buddhism very often at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything set in Sikkim, aka northern India. That’s infinitely more interesting to me than another rehash of Medieval Europe!

Black Hunger is very polished, and reads like many of the best historical fiction novels – the attention to detail is fabulous, and I was amused at how Pullen managed to justify having a main character with closer-to-modern sensibilities than most people of the time period (particularly most Brits of the time period) ever would have had. Unfortunately, I found that main character – John – extremely bland. His one defining trait – his passion for ‘the Orient’ – doesn’t really come through; I never felt it, and even though we’re reading his first-person narration, I didn’t see any actual appreciation of the culture or peoples or landscapes, once he was sent to Sikkim. I adore passionate characters, especially if they’re passionate about something I’m not; passions make you inherently interesting, and the best characters all have them. But John’s felt – like it was just told to us, not shown. And some of that might be the framework – John is writing all this while he waits to die, so no, he probably wouldn’t write pages and pages of why he loves this country, this spirituality, this language so much. He doesn’t have time. But that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for a very meh reading experience.

The Big Bad (at least, so I gather from the first 20% of the book; no telling what might be revealed later on) is a sect of heretical Buddhists called the Dhaumri Karoti. This group is supposed to be extinct by the early 1900s in which Black Hunger is set, but the reader is definitely meant to be suspicious that they have in fact managed to survive. How do you be a heretical Buddhist? Well, these ones want to bring about the end of all life on earth, which, yep, I’m good with calling that a heresy (even if I can kind of follow their reasoning – it’s always a nice surprise when you can understand the villains, even when you disagree!) As far as I can tell, the Dhaumri Karoti are entirely fictional, and I admit that I feel a little weird about that; is it okay to invent a heresy, and thus villains, in a religion/spirituality that’s so poorly understood in the West? I’m not claiming it’s wrong, I just don’t know if it’s a great move. And it left me pretty uncertain about whether I could trust Pullen’s depictions of anything outside historical Britain. Has all of this been done respectfully? Are the depictions of actual places and people at all accurate? I’m not qualified to say.

Between a kind of meh MC, and not feeling the love for the setting through said MC, there wasn’t really much for me to enjoy here. Objectively, I think a lot of it is great, on a technical craft level – but after the first little bit (I can’t say ‘first few chapters’, because there aren’t any) I lost interest. It just…doesn’t have any heart to it? If that makes sense? And while I don’t read Horror often, I do think Black Hunger was taking forever to get to the scary parts.

Bonus: telling us in the first pages that the love interest is dead at the time of writing is not going to make me invested in the ship, actually? Which made the love story part another thing that didn’t engage me.

…Maybe I won’t try it again. I’m mildly curious about the Dhaumri Karoti, but nothing was happening plot-wise a full fifth of the way through the book, I was very bored of the ‘here is the munitae of how I did my dull government job for years and years’, and I felt cast adrift with nothing – not the characters, not the passions, nothing – to anchor me to the story.

I have too many things to read to keep pushing through with something I don’t care about.

If slow-burn historical Horror is your thing, Pullen can at least guarantee you a setting you probably haven’t seen before?

Unfortunately I found this one wasn't for me. It's incredibly intricate and slow paced, and while the plot when it did get going was well done and well researched, I found I'd lost interest. I really didn't gel with the writing style in particular, told primarily in an epistolary format that keeps the pacing all over the place, along with the narrative structure.

I also wasn't so keen on the use of Buddhism here. Not knowing Pullen's background, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but I'll admit it did leave me feeling uncomfortable at times. And not in a good horror way. In fact, the cannabalism didn't really bother me at all, given how ambivalent I was by the end of the book.

Dnf at 7%
Was really rambling and boring
Nothing had really happened and because it’s all told in recap form I didn’t really get to know the characters or care about them
I was practically falling asleep reading
It also doesn’t help that there is only 4 chapters in the book and each is a gazillion pages long
No paragraph breaks
So it all runs on
It’s like listening to that one friend waffle for an hour about nothing
My eyes kept glazing over
I am sure that actual story is interesting but it’s taking so long to get to anything interesting that it isn’t worth the investment
It feels dark academia which is great but a little pretentious though that could just be because the characters are in Oxford

First let me start with saying that the premise for this book seemed so strong for me, however the reality was pretty different.

There are two perspectives I have about this book, the reader perspective and as an academic researcher. On this occasion, the academic researcher in me won, and I couldn't ease into this book as much as I'd hoped I would be able to. I had mixed feelings about it for the first 20% of the read, and many of them were around the way historical elements and religious elements were used. Additionally, the pacing seemed to really lean on the slow side. I just couldn't connect with the characters, there was an emotional depth that I was searching for and at least 30% into the book I should be feeling drawn in by the characters. The long winded chapters just weren't for me, some other people have mentioned that at times it felt a bit like a transcript, as best it's written with a very memoir style of writing. There were times where I just felt the book kept slogging through, and you had to keep slogging to feel like you were even getting somewhere. Even after the slogging it still didn't feel worth it. I don't even feel like I can call this Gothic, particularly. It feels more historical fiction than anything else. There were just so many moments of huge walls of text, that unfortunately made me feel a little removed as a reader.

Now, all I would say is this - don't let reviews from people such as myself put you off. There are some clear indications here that plenty of people thought this was a wonderful book and they connected with it. I unfortunately DNF'd this book, and I rarely ever DNF. I just found myself putting it down and not really picking it back up which indicated that it wasn't worth continuing for me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading too much nonfiction recently, historical nonfiction, a lot of it focused on the British Empire, but if I had known that the plot of this book could be summed up as “plucky English imperialist attempts to save the world from scary Eastern death cult Buddhist sect”, then I would not have touched it with a six mile long bargepole. Maybe even longer, I don’t know. The point is, I wouldn’t have gone near it. Alas, when I marked this one to read, I was labouring under the misapprehension that it was set in the 16th century. It is not. It is set at the height of the British Empire, in Tibet and Mongolia, with brief allusions to India (namely, the love interest who owns a plantation there).

Now, I am perfectly willing to accept that there was something different intended here. That I wasn’t meant to be reading it as a white-saviour narrative of sorts. Perhaps, a tract on not meddling in matters that do not concern you. But all the best intentions (if we can assume there were such intentions here) go astray and instead what we have is a book about a white noble(ish)man who decides to read “Oriental Studies” at university and then it all goes downhill from there.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way this book portrays Tibetan Buddhism (this review, particularly the final paragraph, seems more capable of doing so https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6760510065), but there’s a certain amount of side-eyeing I’m doing when it comes to books like this. Especially given our main characters are white imperialists, it seems to be used as a way to exoticise the gothic aspects of the narrative. Why is this white man the one who’s going to take down this death cult? Why is there set up a whole cadre of white men to do so? If you have read anything about the British Empire, this should be ringing some loud alarm bells in your head. This book then takes the interesting direction of having a lot of the villains also be white, which I guess is an attempt to avoid the whole white man vs scary Easter death cult, but guess what! It’s too late! You’ve dug your grave and lain in it by this point.

While the book does feel thoroughly (and, at points, tediously — you do not need to put every little tidbit you found in there!) researched, as that review I linked pointed out, there are times where it takes the research and makes a deductive leap that very definitively shows a lack of understanding of Buddhism. Even knowing very little about Buddhism, it felt to me at times like that lack of understanding was showing, and not even in a narratively-these-are-white-imperialists-who-would-think-like-this kind of way. In a the-author-has-misunderstood kind of way.

Putting my qualms about the overall plot aside for a second though, this book is one of the most boring books I’ve read this year. And I’ve read a lot of books, and a lot of boring ones at that! Because of this whole scary Eastern death cult, it elects to infodump everything onto you in the first part, in a not very fluid way. So, part one is a slog, not helped by a narrator who made me want to gouge my eyes out. Again, to a certain extent maybe intentional, but he read as an obliviously selfish noble(ish)man in an imperialist society, and I could never warm to him. Not only that, but you’re supposed to believe his relationship with his manservant is some kind of big, epic love, but you only ever get his side of things, you never see how Gareth might tire of the treatment he (necessarily? According to the protagonist) receives. Not that I found much sympathy for Gareth, given that he’s the aforementioned love interest who owns a plantation in India. At the turn of the 20th century, what do you think they did on plantations in India? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have been with their own two hands.

Other parts of this book tell stories within stories, which stuck out to me about as much as… nothing at all. I couldn’t tell you anything about them, they were so incredibly unmemorable. Of course, they all eventually relate back to this scary Eastern death cult, as needs must, but although they were clearly aimed at elucidating some background to all this, they never captured my attention. Furthermore — and this is probably the worst offence of the plot-minus-orientalism — none of this was in the least bit scary. Perhaps that was because I read it all with a very detached feeling. The writing felt like it was holding you at arms’ length, which certainly didn’t help in making the sense of horror at all apparent.

If this book hadn’t had these orientalist overtones, then it would merely have been, to me, a really effing boring read. As it was, it was effing boring and awful. So, the one-star.

In Black Hunger, Nicholas Pullen offers a darkly evocative blend of queer gothic horror and historical fiction, drawing readers into a macabre world teetering on the edge of madness and the supernatural. Set against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War and British colonialism, the novel follows John Sackville, an aristocrat writing his final testament from within an asylum. His tragic journey spans England, colonial India, and beyond, weaving together themes of queer love, occult mysteries, and the chilling history of a Buddhist death cult.

Pullen's narrative excels in atmosphere, dripping with gothic tension and eerie historical detail, reminiscent of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. The novel’s slow-building dread is masterfully handled, pulling readers into an abyss of existential terror. While the tension and plot intricacies make for a gripping read, some characters—like Garrett, John’s lover—feel a little underdeveloped, existing more to serve the plot than as fully fleshed individuals. Nonetheless, the chilling depth of the story, paired with its historical richness, more than compensates.

A solid gothic debut, Black Hunger captivates with its haunting prose and historical insight, even if it occasionally sacrifices character depth for atmosphere. Fans of gothic horror and historical mysteries will find this a rewarding, if unsettling, read.

The Black Hunger is dark and gothic as promised, and holds much in common with the Victorian gothic novels which clearly inspired it; at times I felt like I could be reading Frankenstein or Dracula where the narrative is heavily descriptive and the narrator's voice is sometimes overly interested in their own opinions and has the pomposity of the British Empire and the age of innovation driving their Oxford-educated thinking.

Yes, The Black Hunger has chilling, spine-tingling moments and plays to base fears which had me jumping at shadows. However, particularly in the early sections, I found I was often skim-reading because the writing was so verbose which is typical of this style. Sections would capture my interest, attention and imagination, then whole chapters would be of lesser draw and I would be skimming again - keen to know the overall outcomes but not to get bogged down in the minutiae.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and generally love the gothic style but this was, for me, a bit overdone, mostly in the first third as after this it really picks up and the action helps speed things along. It is of course a delicate balance to get right. I would also question whether this is correctly marketed as a romance (as it has been in some places). Yes there is a romantic MM relationship but it's not the main focus of any character's story, nor does it follow the expectation of romances ending in a happy resolution, we're told that from the very outset.

I did find I was thinking about the book days and weeks after reading and have recommended it to several people - far more than most books I read. Something about it stayed with me and was interesting, different and engaging enough to keep that spark.

Thank you to NetGalley, Little, Brown Book Group UK/ Orbit, and the author for the ARC. This is my honest review.

The cover is a bit weird, but it should not deter you from reading this book!
This was very well written and well thought out, and I thoroughly enjoyed it! A definite must read for all lgbtq people out there!

Atmospheric, traditional gothic style, wonderfully disturbing premise.

Here are the notes of John Sackville as he recounts his otherworldly story before his end rapidly approaches. It begins with forbidden love and his journey takes him to the far east, where he becomes embroiled in an unspeakable, demonic conspiracy.

There are readers who love flowing prose, slow world building, for the journey of the book to be in the lyricism of the writing. And then there are readers who need stuff to happen. This book is option one while I’m option two. I can totally appreciate what this book was trying to do AND what it achieves, but it is meandering and took two weeks to read.

The style is very reminiscent of Dracula which it carries off admirably. The characters are amazing, though I did find the movement from John, then back in time to Samuel and then back in time to Ian jarring in the narrative flow.

When action does happen it is WILD in the best way and the information around it is generally quite interesting, there’s just a lot of it…

It was an ambitious undertaking and largely successful. It’s evocative, descriptive and compelling but it is also very, very long. The way it feeds in to historical events is aldo really powerful. I just would have enjoyed it more with shorter chapters.

Thank you to #netgalley and #littlebrownbooksuk for my #arc

I dont know what to say about The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen. I was so excited to read this one I mean queer gothic horror YES PLEASE!
However the pacing was off, it was very slow and I couldn't connect to the characters. The novel is split into three quarters, as we go through the journey of John trying to save the world. This book is laden with historical references to ancient Asian spiritualities and customs, which I have no background in and thus no frame of reference, and I found myself bogged down in the dry technicalities of every painfully meticulous detail.

At the root of "The Black Hunger" is a fascinating, unique, and compelling story, but the pacing and telling of it saps the magic from the story itself. This book wasn't for me, but I can see the appeal that it could have for others.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

I am not sure how to talk about this book. I have many feelings about it, some of which are rather complicated, which I am not sure if I will be able to express adequately.

Firstly, I really enjoyed the writing style, which reminds me of classic gothic novels in the best ways. I loved the epistolary format of this novel, and the way it's interspersed with diary entries and (more) letters. The atmosphere is haunting at times, and downright terrifying at others. I could sort of guess how this book would end, but at the same time, the story is riveting and I couldn't put it down.

I will say, there are only five chapters in this whole 400 page book, which could make it a tough reading experience. For me, I struggled to find intervals where I could put the book down, which isn't really a problem I guess, because I wanted to keep reading anyway.

I also loved the romance, which was really sweet but also heart-wrenching. I appreciate how the characters navigated their dynamic, of being master and servant, as well as how dedicated they are to each other. However, I should note that this is NOT a romance novel. If you want to read this for the romance, refer to the synopsis and reevaluate.

One important aspect I have to discuss is how Buddhism factors into the story. Given that the Evil Cult in this book follows a (fictional) heretical branch of Buddhism, I was a little worried about how Buddhism would be portrayed. Barring the Evil Cult, I think the author did a good job of being respectful to the religion and culture; the main character is a white guy who studies Buddhism, and he is portrayed as respectful and fascinated by Buddhist/foreign culture and texts. (I have seen some other reviewers criticise this book as being too "woke", so.) However, this book references and quotes translations of Buddhist texts, as well as features important historical figures like the Dalai Lhama. Given that I have zero knowledge of early 20th century Tibetan Buddhism, I have no idea how accurate or realistic this portrayal is.

I was raised Buddhist, so I know some of the basic lore enough to know what's going on, as well as which aspects of the story are fictionalised. When reading other reviews of this book, I realised that a lot of readers know basically nothing about Buddhism. This makes me worried that people may read this book and form incorrect, or even damaging beliefs about Buddhists or Buddhism.

My version of this book is an eARC, so this may have been included in the final version, but I believe that the above issues I mentioned could be easily rectified by including an Author's Note to clarify which aspects of the book are fictionalised, as well as references to research sources.

I will say, I do appreciate Buddhism being such a large focus. Most gothic novels take place in western settings and focus on Christianity or Catholicism, and lots of horror genre cults are some variation of Satanic, so I quite enjoyed getting to read a gothic novel inspired by my own religion for once, even if some bits might be blasphemous.

There's a lot more that could be discussed about the book's approach to, like, religion in general, but I'm going to leave my thoughts on this as is, simply because I am not knowledgeable enough to analyse this.

I think this could be a divisive novel; as far as I can tell, people either love or hate the writing style and format, and the inclusion of Buddhism seems to have left other reviewers confused (people who don't know what's going-on) or conflicted (people who do know what's going on, enough to point out that the depiction of Buddhism is worrying).

Personally, while I am still somewhat conflicted about the portrayal of Buddhism, I would still highly recommend this novel to gothic horror enthusiasts.

Overall, this is a phenomenal novel, one that fascinated and moved me.

This just didn’t work for me, the long rambling chapters had me tuning out which doesn’t often happen when i’m reading an ebook or physical (it can happen with audios more often). I did get gothic vibes from it so that was done well and the cover and description really caught my attention. I just feel this could have been shortened and broken down into more chapters to improve the pacing. I also feel like it could have gotten to the main plot quicker with world building and background fed in alongside the plot rather than having such a big chunk of the start spent setting it up. I saw another review describe it as similar to a script from a university lecture and I would agree, so if that was the intention then well done but that’s not something I enjoy reading

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.

Not my usual read but I enjoyed it! Definitely read trigger warnings for this! It was slow for about half the book but it did pick up

Sadly this didn't really work for me. I appreciate more queer fiction in different genres coming onto the market. But the writing style kept me at arms length from the characters and I didn't feel emotionally connected to them. I also felt as if some of the exposition/explanations especially of the bhuddist/tibetan culture ended up as just walls of text. Maybe this was just the format but it was like several pages of just dialogue paragraphs. It felt very bogged down.

I was disappointed with this. It was just too much focus on Buddhism and the sects and it just became very dry very quickly for me. Very well written though