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Most post-apocalyptic fiction is interested in what happens after the world ends — the violence, the scarcity, the collapse of social structures, the question of who survives and what they become. The Dog Stars is interested in something quieter and more difficult: what it feels like to still be alive.
Hig has been living in a small airport in Colorado for nine years, since a flu pandemic killed most of humanity including his wife. He has a dog, Jasper. He has a neighbour, Bangley, a cold-eyed survivalist who keeps them alive through tactical violence. He has a small plane. He flies patrol routes over the Rocky Mountains. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for exactly.
Then he picks up a radio signal from beyond his fuel range. Someone else is out there.
The Prose
Peter Heller is first and foremost a nature writer — he’s written books about fly fishing, kayaking, and wilderness travel — and The Dog Stars reads like a post-apocalyptic novel written by someone whose primary interest is the physical world. The Colorado landscape is rendered with extraordinary precision and beauty. The mountains, the sky, the quality of light at different times of day — Heller writes it all with the attentiveness of someone who has spent his life looking.
The prose style is fragmented and elliptical — incomplete sentences, unconventional punctuation, a rhythm that mimics the way thought actually moves when you’re alone a lot. It takes a few pages to adjust to. Once you do, it’s some of the most distinctive writing in recent American fiction.
Hig and Bangley
The central relationship is one of the book’s great pleasures. Hig is gentle, melancholy, a man who reads poetry and grieves openly. Bangley is tactical, unsentimental, capable of actions Hig couldn’t perform and unwilling to examine the cost. They need each other in ways neither would have chosen and both understand.
The friendship — if that’s the right word — is written with real care and the mutual dependency develops across the novel into something genuinely affecting.
The Dog
Jasper is a good dog. I mention this because it is relevant and you deserve to know. Whether Jasper makes it — I won’t tell you, but I will say that Heller handles the question with considerably more intelligence and emotional honesty than most novels manage. Be prepared regardless.
The Second Half
When Hig follows the radio signal and discovers there are people beyond his range, the novel shifts from elegy to something with more forward movement. The second half is more conventionally plotted than the first and works somewhat differently as a result. Some readers prefer the drift of the opening; others find the structure of the second half more satisfying. Both halves are good. They’re doing different things.
What It’s Not
The Dog Stars is not The Road. The comparison is inevitable — post-apocalyptic, literary, male protagonist, survival — but Heller’s novel is warmer and less punishing than McCarthy’s. It believes more in the possibility of connection. If The Road left you too devastated to consider another post-apocalyptic novel, this is the one to try next.
Rating: 4.5/5
Rated 4.1 Stars on Amazon. Buy The Dog Stars here.
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Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
