PRODUCER NIK VS THE DOG STARS

Peter Heller takes Nikolas on a low-elevation flight over a dying America to show him that the end of civilization was only the beginning with THE DOG STARS.

Hig’s wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley.

But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists outside their tightly-controlled perimeter. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return and follows its static-broken trail, only to find something that is both better and worse than anything he could ever hope for.

Title: The Dog Stars

Author: Peter Heller

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic / Dystopian

Pages: 336

Format: Paperback / eBook / Audiobook

Are you searching for a more human take on the end of human civilization?

I’ve had a lifelong love of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, from the books I read as a child like The Stand, Swan Song, The Day of the Triffids, and A Canticle for Leibowitz to more recent titles like The Road, The Hunger Games, Wool, and Seveneves. There’s a wide variety of dystopian literature out there, and with such myriad options available, it seems like there’s hardly room for anything new.

I assure you this is not the case.

Peter Heller’s novel, The Dog Stars, successfully argues the point that what an individual author brings to the table can transform a well-trod narrative into something wholly fresh and new. While major aspects of the story are focused on the day-to-day struggle to survive in an America depleted of human civilization—along with an increasing number of the animal species that once called the dying land home—it never feels like it’s simply rehashing the same narrative you’ve seen a hundred times before with a different cast of characters. Hig and Bangley never come across as being interchangeable with characters I’ve encountered in other novels, and the way Heller delves into their everyday lives showcases that the challenges and sporadic threats aren’t sufficient to do away with the tedium and exhaustion that comes from years of performing the same routines.

If you’re looking for action, violence, and horror, this is not going to be the book for you. There’s certainly plenty of violence, but that’s not what Heller is shining the spotlight on. At center stage in The Dog Stars is grief, the unpalatable grief associated with lost loved ones and the more nebulous suffering that comes from the loss of the plethora of strangers and acquaintances that make up the world we take for granted. Even nine years after the world around him collapsed, Hig is still fighting to come to terms with everything that’s gone, with only his old dog, Jasper, and his unlikely friend and neighbor, Bangley, helping him to hold it all together. The loss of either one of them could be all it takes to push him over the edge, where he precariously balances between survival and oblivion.

If you’re looking for something that helps you feel what it might feel like to be one of the survivors, this is a book I can’t recommend enough.

Written almost a decade before the Covid-19 pandemic turned many of our lives upside down, Peter Heller depicted a world where one pandemic after another followed in lockstep with escalating global warming, bringing everything to a crashing halt. All we can hope for is that tales like this one aren’t prescient, because it could very well have been too late for a warning to make any difference—even back in 2012.

Nikolas P. Robinson is an avid consumer of books, movies, and television, especially where horror, science fiction, and fantasy are concerned. When he isn’t consuming media, he’s creating it as an author, photographer, videographer, and news producer in Portland, Oregon.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing, nor do the views or opinions of Crystal Lake necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or its staff. Thank you for understanding.