Peter Heller's The Dog Stars
Bemoaning an abundance of dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction right now isn’t exactly fair. During the Cold War, there was a flood of sci-fi dealing with nuclear war and fallout. Now, the reason zombies are ambling through our fiction, or the Earth’s orbit is slowing, or deadly viruses are spreading, is because authors have climate change, flu epidemics, technology failures and other 21st century problems on their minds. In this way, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars stands in line with other post-society Earth-as-a-disaster-area books released this year. But there’s one major difference: Heller approaches the task like a poet.
The novel’s narration comes from a man named Hig, in his forties and a survivor a strange, flu-like virus that has …show more content…
I don’t count the years. I don’t multiply by seven.
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?
These kinds of short, punctuated sentences pervade the whole of The Dog Stars. In some ways it helps to convey the facts about this world faster. In other ways, the reader feels like they’re getting this terrible version of Earth through a minimalistic poetic viewpoint. But this isn’t a flowery poetic style. Heller has a background as an outdoorsman, and frequently writes non-fiction for Outside Magazine, Natural Geographic Adventure, and similar periodicals. Naturally, this helps create a sense of total authenticity to the survival strategies employed by both Hig, and the other major character, Bangley. If Nick Frost’s gun-toting survivalist character from Spaced were rewritten without irony or slapstick humor, he’d likely be Bangley. A killer and a survivor, Bangley is a creepy, violent guy that Hig isn’t sure he actually needs to be around. As I read, I kept feeling like Bangley could have turned on me at any second. Hig needs this character to protect the “perimeter” and to keep various infected human survivors away from them. In this catastrophic scenario, uninfected human beings behave like they’re avoiding zombies; except the zombies are just other sick and desperate
The novel’s narration comes from a man named Hig, in his forties and a survivor a strange, flu-like virus that has …show more content…
I don’t count the years. I don’t multiply by seven.
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?
These kinds of short, punctuated sentences pervade the whole of The Dog Stars. In some ways it helps to convey the facts about this world faster. In other ways, the reader feels like they’re getting this terrible version of Earth through a minimalistic poetic viewpoint. But this isn’t a flowery poetic style. Heller has a background as an outdoorsman, and frequently writes non-fiction for Outside Magazine, Natural Geographic Adventure, and similar periodicals. Naturally, this helps create a sense of total authenticity to the survival strategies employed by both Hig, and the other major character, Bangley. If Nick Frost’s gun-toting survivalist character from Spaced were rewritten without irony or slapstick humor, he’d likely be Bangley. A killer and a survivor, Bangley is a creepy, violent guy that Hig isn’t sure he actually needs to be around. As I read, I kept feeling like Bangley could have turned on me at any second. Hig needs this character to protect the “perimeter” and to keep various infected human survivors away from them. In this catastrophic scenario, uninfected human beings behave like they’re avoiding zombies; except the zombies are just other sick and desperate