“The Dog Stars” takes place in Colorado, nine years after a super-flu has killed ninety-nine per cent of the people on the planet. (Nuclear Armageddon, the pretext for most early postapocalit, has been largely replaced by viral plagues.) The main character, Hig, lives at an abandoned airstrip with a violent wacko named Bangley and one of the most lovable dogs in recent literature, Jasper. The story concerns their struggle for resources and survival, which pits them against various desperadoes and also leads Hig to an unlikely romance with an epidemiologist, which leavens the book’s mournful tone. “The Dog Stars” doesn’t have zombies or super-vampires in it, à la Cronin; the dangers in Heller’s world are real, and all the scarier for being so casually deadly. It also has some of the best flying scenes I’ve ever read; it’s like “Deliverance” in an airplane.
The prose bears an obvious debt to manly sentence-smiths like McCarthy, Hemingway, and Jack London, but it also has lyrical descriptions of landscape and nature reminiscent of James Dickey’s poetry. Heller is a longtime outdoors author and magazine writer, for “Outside” in particular, and he takes a “Big Two-Hearted River” approach to his nature writing, constructing the natural world block by verbal block. Indeed the book can be read not merely as a horror fantasy but as an extended allegory about climate change and environmental degradation. The elk are gone, because of some mysterious disease, and “the trout are gone every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats cutbows, every one,” because the creeks are too warm. Throughout the book Heller plays a wrenching minor chord of abiding loss.
I would also add, on a personal note, that it’s always exhilarating (and quite rare) to see a journalist forgo familiar ground for the uncharted territory of fiction, and make such a brilliant success of it. Because what journalist doesn’t secretly dream of doing the same?
—John Seabrook