by Corrine Watson
June 2, 2026
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller; Tin House Press; 320 pages; $28
Claire Fuller’s latest novel, Hunger and Thirst, is an eerie, paranormal slow burn that leaves the reader questioning reality. Fuller balances tropes of supernatural horror, true crime, and coming-of-age drama with nuance that defies genre. Beyond the horror, though, there is a sense of desperation at the heart of the story as Fuller captures the narrator’s longing for family, creative fulfillment, and acceptance.
Moving between two timelines the novel centers around the events leading to the disappearance of a teenage girl and the mystery of a condemned squat house called the Underwood in 1987. Following the perspective of the only witness, Ursula, whose ghosts refuse to stay buried, Fuller offers a unique take on the unreliable narrator. At sixteen, Ursula is already haunted by the death of her mother and scarred by the feeling of being unwanted after growing up in the care system. As we watch her try to navigate independence, it’s clear that some of her perspective is shaped by fear and the naivete of her age. And as an adult, Fuller allows Ursula and the reader to view her experiences with a bit more clarity as she sees them with the context of maturity and outside perspective. Yet there is still an awkward divide between her experience and the public’s narrative of her as an easily manipulated child, hungry for connection no matter the cost.
Drawing on the title, Fuller captures the weight of hunger and thirst in a way that goes beyond the basic need for sustenance. The characters are hungry to create, to dream, and to find their place in the world. After years of abandonment and moving from one temporary residence to the next, Ursula craves for belonging and family. Fuller shows Ursula making decisions in a way that strives to meet her most fundamental needs for safety and community, yet this also puts her in situations where she is forced to compromise her own interests to conform to the will of others. We see this play out with her whirlwind friendship with Sue, who likes to live impulsively and drag others along with her until she gets bored. This leads her to the ill-advised move into the Underwood with Sue’s boyfriend, Vince. In spite of her reservations about Vince who’s easily temperamental and worse when he drinks, and warnings from social workers about squat houses, Ursula complies to stay close to Sue. As an adult Ursula is able to reflect on her feelings towards Vince and Sue and concludes what she felt wasn’t jealousy, but “a fear of being left out,” and was driven by “the shame that [she] might be unlovable.” Through this insight, Fuller subtly draws attention to the ways Ursula makes herself small or compliant within her community to maintain her place within the structure of her found family.
When Ursula meets Sue’s family, she’s overwhelmed by the sense of chaotic community and love at the dinner table but can’t seem to bring herself to eat anything. “I suddenly found that I wasn’t hungry, too full instead of family, inclusion, acceptance.” For the first time since she lost her mother, Ursula feels like she’s found a safe space and is willing to do whatever it takes to avoid rejection. Yet it is this behavior that makes the public’s later assumptions about her involvement in the crime feel disturbingly plausible.
The Underwood stands out in a way that feels like a character in the story. Echoing with the solemn piano melody on the record player, and filled with the former resident’s possessions, it feels as if the home was frozen at a particular moment in time, just waiting for the family to return. What makes Hunger and Thirst particularly unsettling is that its haunting is never fully explained. The novel resists the urge to provide answers: we do not know what force inhabits the Underwood, where the missing bodies have gone, or why the presence is so thirsty. We only have to trust Ursula’s experience and intuition to run from danger. Even Ursula struggles to distinguish between fear and reality, noting that she once enjoyed horror films because she “liked the feeling of being scared while knowing [she] was safe” in the real world, but in the Underwood it became harder to distinguish was “was real or pretend”. This ambiguity is mirrored in Ursula’s own story. She confesses to Sue’s murder, describing in detail how she killed her in a moment of emotional desperation when the idea of prison or institutionalization felt safer than whatever entity she’d faced in the Underwood, but no one believes her. Even as time passes and a documentary stirs up the events of the past, the public opinion remains that she was manipulated, traumatized, or delusional.
There is a sense of inevitably as things fall apart unrelated to the Underwood, but in Ursula’s persistent fear of abandonment. Fuller captures the emotional weight by focusing on the heartbreak we see in Ursula, losing everyone she’d grown close to over the last year. As Sue’s family shapes Vince into a villain, she wants to correct the narrative, but can’t speak up. She’s feeling shame, guilt, and fear for her part in Sue's death and Vince’s descent into madness, but there’s also grief and anger and she watches the family she thought she loved slip away. Fuller writes, “I was also dealing with another emotion that I was only starting to process: grief. I had lost Sue, and in five minutes around the table eating Sunday lunch, I no longer belonged in this family.” In this moment, the novel’s central tension comes into focus: the loss of belonging proves more devastating than the horror itself, as Ursula carries that fear of abandonment into adulthood, finding more safety in isolation
Ultimately, Hunger and Thirst is more than a ghost story, but resonates with the insatiable longing for acceptance. Through Ursula’s experience Fuller captures the ways we crave community and the devastation of not only rejection, but telling your truth and still having your reality rewritten by outside observers.
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The Insatiable Longing for Acceptance: Isolation and Belonging in Claire Fuller's Hunger and Thirst
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Vatazhen from Pexels
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations and the Southern Review of Books. Follow her on X @CorrineWatson6.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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