Name: The dog stars
ISBN: 9780307959942

Peter Heller

a novel

The dog stars

Zachary Roberts

“They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish. Why didn’t they breed them to live longer? To live as long as a man?”

J. L. Askew

A first-rate debut novel of how one man suffers loss, experiences grief, and overcomes adversity in a post-apocalyptic world.
The story is told by the main character, Hig, from the first person point-of-view. When introducing himself he says “Hig, rhymes with ‘big’”. Perhaps this is a subliminal attempt to make himself more important because of his sensitive nature. “If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone” and “I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.” But everything has changed, nature has been violated, the forest now “Beetle killed and droughted.”
The book is largely Hig’s ruminations as he copes with a world that is dying from global warming, devastated by societal breakdown, and decimated by an apocalyptic plague that killed his wife.
“The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice, why we live on the plain, why I patrol every day.”
He and a fellow survivor named Bangley keep guard over a small air strip in rural Colorado where Hig operates a Cessna to surveil the region, looking for any marauding bands that might attack. Hig always keeps his faithful dog Jasper at his side. Bangley, an ex-military expert in tactics and firearms, had showed up one day with a trailer full of arms and ammunition. The three make a team. “I flew, He [Bangley] killed, [watchdog] Jasper growled.” Bangley promptly kills anyone coming near, aiming that if only one human is left, it’ll be him. “Bangley was a survivor with a capital S.” 
As the story proceeds, the two have some close calls that keep the reader turning pages. There are limited action sequences, but these are well described, building suspense until the situation culminates in a satisfying way.
On two occasions Hig sinks into despair and finds himself not thinking clearly. Both times he wanders too far from base, once in a trek to the forest and later in a flight past “the point of no return”. The wayward flight almost leads to his death but then an unexpected reversal changes his life completely. These scenes are gripping because the reader is up close, experiencing the action.
The first person viewpoint puts the reader inside Hig’s head, revealing his delicate makeup and contemplative nature. “In the beginning there was fear.” Then he had “Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105, I know it cooked my brains.” His brain fog comes through as the story unfolds, parts of the narrative becoming nearly incoherent and hard to follow. While jarring and confusing, the choppy sentences are likely an intended effect, evoking the strange unreality of a post-apocalyptic world.
Hig experiences long periods of thought and introspection, having memories called up by sights he sees from the air or places he goes when he lands. In this new world, there are few people to talk to, but Hig has an active mental life, and the narrative viewpoint brings his thought processes vividly to the reader. Some scenes are evocative, as when Hig goes to a remote remnant of thriving forest.
“In a pool below me the dark surface was dusted with green pollen. The roots of a tree exposed in the bank snaked over the water and in their spaces old spiderwebs swayed in the wind and glimmered along the threads with its rhythm.”
But lengthy confinement to Hig’s “brain-cooked” reality eventually becomes stifling and smothering. The truncated and unpunctuated dialogue is distracting. There are too many endless revelries. The irregular chain of Hig’s thoughts, the memories, and asides, inevitably slow the narrative. This reaches a nadir when Hig wanders into an abandoned bookstore, picking up a child’s book illustrated with pond creatures where “a very young child had written in pencil on each page” under each illustration, “I love . . .”, with the animal’s name. Telling the story in the first person gives the reader an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. Heller’s lyrical prose is never allowed to soar.
Another flaw is the books excess of blasphemies, first spouted by Bangley, appearing to be a tag to define his character. But Heller is too good a writer to need such a crutch. He could have used a more subtle approach, relying less on blunt force. Soon the expression becomes more frequent, appearing in other figures and certainly grating the senses of many readers. It is clear Heller is doing this for effect. Such excess goes far beyond character development and in the end becomes a statement about something else, beyond the book.

Cindy Lieberman

Explores the range of "humanity" one might experience as a surviving human in a post-pandemic Colorado. And a love poem to the planet.

Jeremy Anderberg

I've always been a sucker for post-apocalypse novels. Especially the ones that dwell a little more on human nature than on pure survival. I'm talking The Stand, The Road, California, The Passage, Station Eleven — these are more literature than pure thriller (though they are often still heart-pounding).

Enter Peter Heller and The Dog Stars.

I loved this book almost right away for the simple fact that it's set in a small town just north of the Denver metro. Hig is a nice guy pilot who's holed up at a small airport with a crusty, gun-nut survivalist named Bangley. They live an Odd Couple-like existence in a world in which 99% of the population has been wiped out by a flu pandemic. Hig, with his flying skills, surveils their perimeter in his small airplane, and Bangley is the tactical guy, fending off plenty of bad guys.

One day during Hig's airborne patrols, he hears a faint ping from a far off airport — one that's beyond his turnaround range of making it back home. And one day, three years later, he decides on a whim to go after that ping. What happens is a surprising and wonderful story, and one that I'll leave you to wonder about until you pick it up yourself.

What's differentiates The Dog Stars from others in the genre is what makes it so great. The earth itself is damaged, but still viable. Hig and his trusty dog take R&R excursions into the mountains to just fly fish, which they both seem to genuinely enjoy. There are meditations on the simple joys of flying. This isn't a wasteland novel. There's still beauty — as well as friendship and love — in the world.

It's also just really beautifully written; lyrical and poetic, with a lot of short, staccato sentences that read like journal entries which aren't quite fully formed. There's also a stream-of-consciousness element that I honestly don't typically enjoy, but there's enough plot here that it didn't bother me at all.

I have very few complaints, and highly recommend this book for fans of any of those apocalypse lit titles I mentioned at the start.

Daryl Houston

** spoiler alert **
           Like The Road, The Dog Stars tells a story of the struggles of the few after a cataclysmic event that seems to have left most of the world dead and what remained of the world hard, desperate, bloodthirsty. Unlike McCarthy's book, Heller's has about it a certain (but thankfully not overdone) whimsy, an occasional glimmer of humor. It's a lovely book written in spare but often somehow also lyrical prose. Heller is apparently more well-known for his nonfiction, but I hope he writes a few more novels.

The book is not without its missteps. The sudden ease with which Pops and Hig fall into a rhythm and a camaraderie as they storm the Grand Junction airport is a little out of step with the pace of their relationship so far (but then again, desperate circumstances are probably a catalyst). Aunt B and Uncle Jesse at that airport are enough of a surprise that they invite questions that only distract from the otherwise pretty smooth arc of the story. Give us characters out of Deliverance here instead (it's ok that we've seen similar characters already within the story). And the settling of hard old Bangley -- his ready acceptance of Pops as a sort of surrogate father -- feels a little convenient. Heller, who cites Infinite Jest as the protagonist's favorite book, should feel comfortable enough leaving the odd end hanging loose. The tail end doesn't really work for me; Heller has written a lovely enough thing himself that he need not deflate it by ending with somebody else's poem.

Still, it's a really good book that I'm grateful to have had recommended to me. I imagine it's one I'll read again.

Surviving a pandemic disease that has killed everyone he knows, a pilot establishes a shelter in an abandoned airport hangar before hearing a random radio transmission that compels him to risk his life to seek out other survivors. A first novel by the author of The Whale Warriors. Reprint.

The dog stars a novel

Reviews

Popular highlights