Chief Reviewer
- Posts 6268
- Location Nullibiety
- WRZ$
341970.80
TITLE: The Dog Stars
AUTHOR: Peter Heller
GENRE: Literary Fiction
PUBLISHED: August 2012
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: All readers strive for a similar objective: that each book he or she reads is a compelling page-turner. Hurry, keep reading! Forget sleep, forget work... What happens next? The sad truth is that only a few outliers crop up, as with any statistical distribution. Nonetheless, we keep reading - good, bad, and indifferent - because we just know the next book will prove to be the book we seek.
Peter Heller's The Dog Stars is that book. The novel tells the tale of Hig, who lost everything near and dear to him, in a world depopulated, rapidly and suddenly, by a super-flu, and then all hell breaks out...
In the beginning there was Fear. Not so much the flu by then, by then I walked, I talked. Not so much talked, but of sound body—and of mind, you be the judge. Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105, I know it cooked my brains. Encephalitis or something else. Hot. Thoughts that once belonged, that felt at home with each other, were now discomfited, unsure, depressed, like those shaggy Norwegian ponies that Russian professor moved to the Siberian Arctic I read about before. He was trying to recreate the Ice Age, a lot of grass and fauna and few people. Had he known what was coming he would have pursued another hobby. Half the ponies died, I think of heartbreak for their Scandinavian forests, half hung out at the research station and were fed grain and still died. That’s how my thoughts are sometimes. When I’m stressed. When something’s bothering me and won’t let go. They’re pretty good, I mean they function, but a lot of times they feel out of place, kinda sad, sometimes wondering if maybe they are supposed to be ten thousand miles from here in a place with a million square miles of cold Norwegian spruce. Sometimes I don’t trust my thoughts not to bolt for the brush. Probably not my brain, probably normal for where we’re at. I don’t want to be confused: we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice, why we live here on the plain, why I patrol every day.
Hig's losses are deep, almost crippling...
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 every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, every one. The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.
You, as reader, feel Hig's losses, yes, but you also share his losses as though your own...
Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
As brutal, even grim, as Hig's world is, redemption, of sorts, can be had. The problem is that to find it, Hig must risk everything he has - in fact, the only thing he has left. An all or nothing gamble in a world gone crazy.
The writing style, as shown by the quotes above, could be off-putting for some readers; at least, initially. Keep reading, though, for it does not take long before you fall under the spell of Heller's cadences. (Heller uses language and communication as a metaphor for, and fact of, the civilizing influence of society.)
Post-apocalyptic fiction has been done so often, to such wide and varied effect, that assumedly no new or fresh insights can be had. Except Peter Heller finds the way. His decision to place all the apocalypse stuff off-stage, and to instead focus his story on its characters, makes the sense of loss even more palpable - for Hig, for us. You, the reader, share in the shattering losses that continue to accrue as the story unfolds. One scene in particular had me blubbering in anticipation of what I knew was about to occur; even I, jaded reader, had to put the book down and breathe deeply before reading through to that scene's sad end.
The Dog Stars is among the few scream-from-the-rooftop novels, Buy and read this book!, for Heller is simply magisterial. In one phenomenal novel, he puts it all together: plot, setting, character, ideas, and auctorial style. The surprise is, Who knew? The Dog Stars is Heller's first novel, and it leaves me breathlessly impatient for his next. How soon before then?
