The book is better populated than the world, of course, because Hig’s memory brings us his wife, for example. At the start of the book, they’ve developed a strange symbiosis: “I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle.” Breathe life in the telling.Ĭounter I guess to Bangley’s modus which is to kill just about everything that moves.īangley is Hig’s one and only neighbor in this post-apocalyptic world. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. So I wonder what it is this need to tell. In a setting that is literally dying, this is a high-stakes claim. Telling creates not only story but also animates life itself. More hope, especially for this writer: the act of observing, of recording, becomes a strategy for survival. The desire to live cannot be underestimated: “In ten years the I’ll be done with all this.

He survives his wife, his in-utero child, and pretty much everyone else he’s ever known. It’s a violent, brutal world, but Hig is a writer, a lover of poetry, an acute observer of nature, a man whose un-presupposing soul sallies on. We go on being people in a place, even when that place is an earth smoldering in fires, dying and yet also going wild with rampant life in the spaces vacated by 98% of the human population. “Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement,” Hig notes. The humanity that Hig, the narrator, sustains despite incredible loss-personal and planetary-kept me breathing in the face of my worst fears. Yet the post-flu-devastated world of The Dog Stars is oddly comforting and profoundly, if darkly, beautiful. I am not a reader of dystopias, per se, not a fan of fantasies about the future. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. The sentences are rhythmic and sometimes halting in a way that echoes casual human speech, Biblical verse and contemporary poetry: It’s colloquial and poetic at the same time. The Dog Stars stands as sole heir to Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in the precise way it cracked open my understanding of what is possible in prose.įirst, I love the voice. A long time ago, in the early 90s, Denis Johnson’s story “Emergency” unzipped the top of my head and changed how I understood the short story.

The dog stars book