Hig somehow survived the flu pandemic that killed everyone he knows. Now his 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.
One of these days, I'm going to write a dystopian novel in which the dog is just a companion and not a catalyst for some bigger event that happens after their inevitable death. Is that a spoiler? I don't think so, because it's a given that the dog always dies in dystopian/zombie/end of the world type books and movies.
This book has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's marvellous book The Road (which remains to be one of my absolute all time favourite books). I can see why there would be a comparison; ambiguous world, unknown source of apocalypse. Same type of unpunctuated dialogue and strange writing choices and patterns. I found it easier to get into with The Road than with this book. I found I really had to pay attention with Dog Stars to see what was going on. Most of the time the odd syntaxes and sentence structures worked, almost creating a stream-of-consciousness effect. Almost. But every once in a while it didn't work and ultimately felt contrived.
That being said, there were some very well-written parts and moments that I really identified. Peter Heller does a good job of world-building and setting the scene. I could totally buy the scenarios that were going on and could see them happening in real life. I would say that this is no where near as gritty as The Road. About half-way through the novel, when he follows the random transmission from years ago, the narrative switches gears drastically, and suddenly it's as if I'm reading a completely different book compared to the one I was reading previous to this new plot point. It lost me a little bit there, but redeems itself near the end slightly. It could have worked better if written in flashforward form, or have the previous half be told in flashbacks or something. I don't know.
The character development for the most part was fine. We don't really see how Hig and Bangley become allies, especially if Bangley has a "shoot first, ask questions never" sort of mentality. The new characters that show up halfway through are partially developed, but we don't really know what makes them tick. To be fair though, we don't know what makes ANY of the characters tick except for maybe Hig, Bangley and Jasper. Slightly.
Don't get me wrong. This book is in no means bad. It's just okay. The first half is by far the stronger half. I liked this book just fine. The best parts of the book are with the dog, Jasper, and the poetry that Hig recites is also interesting. It would have been cool to see more of the epidemic that wiped out pretty much the entire population. I'm going to give Dog Stars a 3/5. It is a fairly strong fictional debut and had some great scenes scattered throughout an otherwise just okay narrative with slightly clunky writing style.
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