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Summary
Summary
Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows, and now he makes the abandoned airport his home. In his Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return, following the static-broken voice on the radio.
Summary
"Leave it to Peter Heller to imagine a postapocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation. His hero, Hig, flies a 1956 Cessna (his dog as copilot) around what was once Colorado, chasing all the same things we chase in these pre-annihilation days: love, friendship, the solace of the natural world, and the chance to perform some small kindness. The Dog Stars is a wholly compelling and deeply engaging debut." --Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss--and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace.
Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life--something like his old life--exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return--not enough fuel to get him home--following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face--in the people he meets, and in himself--is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.
Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.
Author Notes
PETER HELLER holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men's Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek . His previous books include Kook; The Whale Warriors; and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo Gorge .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hig, the hero of Heller's thoughtful postapocalyptic novel, is a soft man in a hard world. One of the few survivors of a virus that wiped out most of humanity, Hig is better suited to reading poetry, fishing with his dog, and reminiscing than scratching out a hardscrabble existence in the land that used to be Colorado. If it weren't for Bangley, a cantankerous, survivalist neighbor, roaming hordes of bandits would have killed Hig long ago. So, finding himself alive despite everything that's happened, Hig must to forge a new life in a new world. Narrator Mark Deakins turns in a winning performance. He deftly alternates between Hig's inner monologue, lush descriptions of the Colorado Rockies, and staccato prose. Throughout the book, Hig's first-person narration is interrupted by the imagined voice of Bangley-an element that could be confusing for listeners. Deakins rises to the challenge, however, creating distinct voices for the characters and an enjoyable listening experience. A Knopf hardcover. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Outdoor life has been the focus of Heller's award-winning nonfiction. In his gripping first novel, his gift for action and appreciation for prowess and courage fuel a harrowing yet charming postapocalyptic tale. The book's complex spell is cast by its tough yet sensitive can-do narrator, Hig. Happiest while trout fishing, he's a skilled hunter, daring pilot, and poet turned outdoorsy writer. Hig misses his wife, who died in the nation-crushing pandemic, dearly loves his dog, and is both leery of and grateful for Bangley, an older guy of few words but immense tenacity, military know-how, and firepower. They are holed up in a small Colorado airport, fighting off intermittent assaults by bands of murderous survivors. Richly evocative yet streamlined journal entries propel the high-stakes plot while simultaneously illuminating Hig's nuanced states of mind as isolation and constant vigilance exact their toll, along with his sorrow for the dying world as global warming worsens. Hig takes long, risky, meditative walks; tends the garden; and stubbornly takes to the air in a 1956 Cessna, searching for some remnant of civilization. Heller's surprising and irresistible blend of suspense, romance, social insight, and humor creates a cunning form of cognitive dissonance neatly pegged by Hig as an apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell a novel, that is, of spiky pleasure and signal resonance.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
Most post-apocalyptic novels, by their very nature, are despairing beasts. With humankind depleted, the world in ruins, and survivors left to fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world, how could they be otherwise? Heller's first novel, described in the blurb as "Cormac McCarthy's The Road but with hope", shows how: have a rugged, humane first-person narrator describe - with quiet rage, yet unbowed determination - a world ravaged by a flu pandemic in which he and one other are the sole survivors. Hig lives on a remote airfield with his dog and a cantankerous, gun-toting neighbour, occasionally flying his Cessna into the wilds and dreaming of a better life. When he receives a radio transmission from outside, he makes a decision to leave behind his familiar life and embark on a one-way journey into the unknown. Magical and life-affirming. - Eric Brown Most post-apocalyptic novels, by their very nature, are despairing beasts. With humankind depleted, the world in ruins, and survivors left to fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world, how could they be otherwise? - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love. As in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves "The Blood," a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of "The Blood" generally keeps people at more than arm's length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn't yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before. Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Hig, the protagonist of this postapocalyptic novel, has been living in an abandoned airplane hangar on the outskirts of Denver for nine years, since a pandemic killed most of the world's population. The trigger-happy Bangley, a former military man who lives nearby, helps protect the pair from raids of starving marauders. Hig has a 1956 Cessna plane with plenty of fuel and a loyal hound to accompany him on his hunting and fishing trips. He grows fresh vegetables in a small garden plot and forages for other necessities in abandoned houses and big-box stores. Heller presents a frightening look at the possible end of civilization, where cities have been burned and survivors have a wasting blood disease. The well-written plot unwinds slowly amid graceful descriptions of the natural world and memories of Hig's earlier life, and Mark Deakins's calm, clear reading lends credibility. VERDICT Adventure, survival, and sf enthusiasts will enjoy this book. ["After an award-winning career as an adventure writer and NPR contributor, Heller has written a stunning debut novel. In spare poetic prose, he portrays a soaring spirit of hope that triumphs over heartbreak, trauma, and insurmountable struggles," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ 7/12.-Ed.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
i I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything. My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. 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. Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I'm not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn't have a brother like me. Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer. Way colder. Still waiting. She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose. No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none. I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She's a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I'm figuring I'm dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts. Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back. * I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn't sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn't run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don't call him that, though, what's the point, there's only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That's our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides. I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It's dangerous, it's an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it's a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that's enough. Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren't too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That's all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley. I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It's a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I've seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn't be believed. Like that. Like fucking why? That's what I asked Bangley, fucking why. She would have caught you. So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me . She maybe wanted food. Maybe. Maybe she'd slit your throat in the middle of the night. I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can't fly, I don't have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none. I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm. So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones. Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job. He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That's how Bangley talks. Because it's thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day's walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don't bother us. That's what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die. We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know. I know, I think: if I am going to die--no If--it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow. Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it'll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We're supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it's warm, but if it's summer I mostly don't. When I wear it, I feel like I'm waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that. Excerpted from The Dog Stars by Peter Heller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
