The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
The Dog Stars

Headline Review, 2012

Hig, a pilot and the hero of this novel, lives in an abandoned hangar with his beloved dog Jasper and dangerous companion Bangley. Nine years ago, a fever of unknown origin wiped out almost the entire population of the planet, yet leaving some alive who carry now the disease called just The Blood. After losing to epidemic fever wife Melissa and an unborn child, Hig left the city in Colorado and moved to the hills, where all this time he’s been fighting for survival.

Together with Bangley they equipped the perimeter - a small piece of land, which became their refuge. On their land Hig and Bangley have built an observation tower, have armed to the teeth (for that is responsible mostly Bangley, an ex-SEAL, in his spare time working on his weapon arsenal) and now they defend themselves from time to time wandering on their territory strangers. Hig makes rounds on his old plane “a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut”, watching the area from the sky, searching for strangers, as well as game and possible supplies, while Bangley watches the perimeter that at any moment could be invaded by "guests". Jasper serves as a night alarm, sleeping side by side with his master. The dog is old, has been with Hig before the fever, but still not in a bad shape.

Heller, who before this book has written about the adventures and travelings around the globe, debuted with a novel. The author immediately went on the genre territory, namely the post-apocalyptic science fiction, certainly causing with that the displeasure and open envy among SF writers. Because science fiction writers don’t write so well. Some do, of course, but it's a small percentage. Let any publishing house throw «The Dog Stars» to its science fiction imprint, and other novels of this genre will look poor, gray and dull, at least stylistically.

And it is not the fault of SF writers that they write that bad, it is Heller’s fault (or achievement) that he writes that well. In building fantastic entourage he, on the contrary, is not too skilled. The novel’s premise is familiar even to those who have not read fiction at all. Heller does not invent the wheel, just takes those wheels that have already been invented, and just put them on his bike, as it is convenient to him. Heller is not particularly interested to play in virologist: there was an epidemic (big deal!), almost the entire population died out (so what?), someone got infected and become a carrier of a strange plague (who cares?), a global warming started - what now, contrary to logic, to make a hero to get behind the microscope and make him study different science fields at once? In conclusion, the author of the novel makes a few vague allusions to the origin of the disease, by the time that's already not important.

What’s important is, Heller has written a book that reads in one breath, you do not want to close it, you beg the author to tell something else, some small detail from the protagonist’s past. The Dog Stars is the imposition of a skillful adventure about the survival out of civilization on a modernist style with the elements of post-apocalyptic fiction and men’s fiction about the search for love. And it makes no sense to look for where one layer ends and the other begins, as they lapped each other.

Depopulating the planet using a fantastic element, Heller makes a perfect background for his drama - the natural world, where people seem to have already become superfluous, but still clinging to existence. For nine years Hig lived only by relying on a fading memory, and almost extinguished hope. Why does one needs a life if the world around you died? Just for the sake of life itself? Having made his hero a pilot of the aircraft, Heller drew an allegory between Hig and birds, but of that sort that is bad with flying: Hig is attached to his piece of land, which gives him at least some security, and missions only tease his imagination and are part of self-defense. The hero can fly, but can not fly away - no place and no need.

As an extraordinary traveler, Heller with unprecedented skill transfers his knowledge of nature and on a page. It's one thing to conquer the rivers and peaks, and the other to describe it as if you the reader plunge into nature, too. To do this you need experience - even if you're a stylist's number one, sitting on a chair somewhere in a residential area of Chicago, you can’t imagine and can not describe all that so authentically as it does Heller.

If Heller’s spirit is closer to Jack London, the style is closer to the experimental prose. The novel is written as a stream of consciousness, where past and present merge, and mangled vocabulary, poeticized in some places. The storyteller prior to the epidemic wrote prose and poetry, perhaps, hence originates the style of The Dog Stars. Remained essentially without writing (the only example in the book is the scene where Hig writes a warning to farmers), Hig initially focuses on spoken language, which has its own laws.

The Dog Stars deserves the highest praise.

The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta
The Leftovers

St. Martin's Press, 2011

Three years before the events described in the novel, a mysterious phenomenon occurs that is similar to the Rapture, to use a biblical term. Millions of people in an instant just disappear from the face of the earth. Among them are not only faithful Christians, but people of all religions and of various moral behavior. Some take the disappearance for the real Rapture, meaning that those who remain on the earth are judged as unworthy of heavenly life, while others believe that the phenomenon only had common features with the predicted phenomenon from the Bible, but the real Rapture it is not.

After The Sudden Departure, as it is called by some, the government announces the state of emergency, shuts down schools and other institutions, the people mourn the missing, and those who had seen their loved ones disappear, are called The Witnesses.

Grief can last for years across the country, and gradually the United States return to normal. The consequences of a global phenomenon in a small town of Mapleton, New York, are described in the novel. In the center of the story is one family in which oddly enough no one has disappeared. The patriarch of the Garvey family, Kevin, was a successful businessman at the time of the Rapture-like phenomenon, his wife Laurie was a housewife, and two children were students - the eldest son Tom in college and daughter Jill in high school.

From chapter to chapter, we move from one family member to another. The global phenomenon has splot split the family, and every family member in their own way is trying to find his/her place in almost new world.

Tom Perrotta has used in his book sci-fi device, and, like many mainstream writers treated to a fantastic device and its properties with disrespect and disdain.

Placing in the base of the story a phenomenon of religious matter, Perrotta surprisingly spends very little time answering the proper questions of religion. Perrotta chose an interesting approach to a global phenomenon: not giving a full explanation of the departure, the author left his world and the characters in it to the freedom of interpretation. Characters had all prerequisites for a full discussion of the phenomenon, similar to that described in the Bible. Perrotta does not even take the side of the supporters of the biblical version, nor on the side of the rationalists, he generally rejects any discussion of the origin of the departure. The most important thing for Perotta was make something so erase as many people from the face of the Earth as possible, while the reason for this disappearance was of the minor importance. So, instead of the Rapture in the book it could have been any epidemic or meteor rain. Not a word was said about the research scientists, nor the statement of high rank religious people (Pope, Orthodox Patriarch etc), respectively, we do not know about the socio-economic implications of global disappearance of countless people. What impact it does on demography, economics, world politics - it seems like nothing has changed.

And even if you convince yourself that Perrotta was interested not in the phenomenon itself, but in what was after, the picture still looks fragile. After such religiocentric phenomenon we see three options for the development of the world in terms of religion. Among all the official representatives of the Catholic Church we see only one priest, highly pissed at the world and God, bringing risen to the path of revenge. The priest began to argue that God took the sinners and betrayed those who truly believed. Is this priest representative? Probably not, but we do not find others, and it is hard to say whether all priests were so bitter that have fallen to the level of gossipers and blackmailers, or just this one turned out rotten.

Two other religious paths are the religious groups, early on quite different with dissimilar structure, and by the finale, we see the corruption and lies within both these newly formed cults.
Church of Holy Wayne is a typical example of the American sects, they usually do not even need a reason for existence. They were there, and Perotta just uses the template of the structure and motives of the already existing sects. Other religious groups, The Guilty Remnant, at first seems like an original idea, with their spying and remaining silent. Perrotta does not develop the theme: the cult was created as if by itself, its structure remains opaque, it does not set any goals, and all that we see is the work of lower-level sectarian and their recruitment methods. By the final sectarian motives become clear: to gather the property and finances of sectarians, choose the most persistent, testing their strength on the ability to kill.
While staying at the dorm Laurie and Meg relate only to those down-to-earth conversations, completely ignoring the issues of religion and faith. Both women chose to stay withing the cult not as a possible way to salvation, but as an opportunity to fence from the world. You can put into question the motives of the two women as they both have not lost the loved ones during the departure. Their families remain on the Earth, and Laurie, if act by logic, should have by all means hold her family together, to support her husband and children, to consider herself lucky that an unknown cataclysm did not violate the integrity of their family.

Perrotta on the contrary is as if blaming Kevin that he hasn’t joined the Guilty Remnant, and sympathizes with and endorses the choice of Laurie.

Novels of ideas too are often elevated and distant from reality. It is a pity that Perrotta could not squeeze in «The Leftovers» any resonable ideas, focusing on daily life of the characters. With the same success, the book could have been written about 9/11: before us is a soap opera about a family where everyone is struggling with the pain and despair in his own way. I do not know whether Perrotta conceived the novel as the basis for the HBO series or rights have been sold after the book was published, but The Leftovers reads as a TV series on paper. It has quite diverse storylines to please everyone, here is enough melodrama and sex (heterosexual and lesbian), there is sufficient amount of details so that the novel had meat on the bones. The problem lies in the fact that Perrotta as if from the very beginning knows how it ends, and simply writes scenes, separate episodes for the show, and he does so without a flame in the heart. Worn style completely denies the story of some colours. Dialog is like a mix between the utterance of banal wisdoms and everyday chitchat. Simply put, the novel lacks some spark, not in the least a stylistic one. For the realist Perrotta is too boring and pat, as a writer with the ideas he lacks his own ideas.

The Leftovers justifies its title: the tastiest pieces have already been eaten, what’s left is the leftovers.

The Last Policeman

Ben Winters
The Last Policeman

Quirk Books, 2012

Asteroid 2011GV1 is coming to Earth, collision is inevitable, the only thing that is not known – the area on the planet the deadly asteroid will hit. Awareness of death radically changes people's behavior. Someone immediately makes suicide, someone quits his or her job and starts working on a "Bucket List " - makes all the dreams and ideas reality, as soon as still there is time. Government stops most of its duties. Internet and mobile communications almost disappear, the use of fuel becomes a felony.

Changes affect state police as well. In the small town of Concord police departments are downsizing, and the number of detectives is minimized. Nobody sees any reasons to investigate the crimes, even the detectives. They drink coffee and discuss the impending end of the world. Most of the police service focused on patrolling the streets.

Death of an insurance agent Peter Zell initially is ruled as suicide. He is found hanging in the toilet at McDonald's, or rather «It's not even a real McDonald's. There are no more real McDonald's. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we're now standing in, on Concord's Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee.»

However, a detective attached to the case, Henry Palace is troubled by some discrepancies in the death of Zell. And while colleagues recommend Palace leave Zell’s death as a suicide, a young detective continues to dig up the truth.

Not being an expert on apocalyptic fiction, I can not say with certainty that this plot had not already been used in the literature in the past, but I do not think the idea is a new one. The initial premise of the novel has a direct effect on a mystery plot. Is death of Zell associated with end of the world or he had some other motives for suicide\murder? Actually a mystery plot is the meat of the novel, and apocalyptic background is an essential part and fuel of the story.

Each plot twist is invariably associated with a future disaster, suggesting that Winters is very skillful writer.

Clever mystery, a good start to the series.

Rivers

Michael Farris Smith
Rivers

Simon & Schuster, 2013

Destructive wind and rain made life impossible in the American Southeast. Incessant rains and hurricanes destroyed and eroded all the Gulf Coast, and people were forced to flee to the north. Government after fruitless struggle for the preservation of life in the Gulf Coast surrendered and announced the full evacuation. All the inhabitants of several southern states were invited to sell their property, collect everything they need and move. The government has drawn The Line separating the flooded states from the rest of the territory. Life below The Line is considered outlaw. Those who choose to remain in the eternal rains and hurricanes territory would lose any help from the state. Life below The Line is permitted at one’s own risk.

Nevertheless, not everyone left the coast, torn by hurricanes. The protagonist of the novel Cohen, a middle-aged man, lives as a hermit in his house, in the company of a horse and a dog. Cohen continually patches his home, even trying to build additional facilities. He promised spacious house to his wife and now keeps his word. Cohen's wife Elisa and their unborn child died during a mandatory evacuation. Now Cohen sees no reason to leave the house, where he expected to spend the rest of life with his beloved wife and children. Cohen has been left only with sorrow and some personal belongings of his wife.

When Cohen once again returnes from the place where he buys fuel for the generator, water, food and ammunition, he meets on the road a pair of young man and a woman. After some consideration, he agrees to drive them a short distance. In the car, the travelers attack him, throwhim out of the jeep, but do not kill him, but taking the jeep and with it a gun and provisions. With dislocated shoulder Cohen barely reaches his home. Looters already visited the place. They took almost everything that can be useful, but Cohen determines that they will still come back, at least for the generator. Among the things missing are even shoebox where Cohen kept his wife’s things.

In short summary Rivers may seem formulaic SF novel, but this is only partly true. The book stands on already acquainted and traversed, on developed soil, but it is completely self-sufficient
work. Smith has his own vision of post-apocalyptic world. This is not getting back to the Middle Ages where people ride on horses and fight with swords, butalso not techno\cyberworld where wild gang ride supercars accompanied by robots. Rather, the world according to Smith can be characterized with almost blues words: a place where everybody fell bad. Or in another way: it is a place where almost no one lives.

Smith developed the variant of a future where a hurricane like Katrina would become commonplace. But the author is not as much interested in world order, as in a story and people, what happens to people in the course of a story.

Since the action of the novel takes place in the U.S. South, the novel has a few special features of the genre called Americana. Here are working hands protagonist and a Creole girl and almighty force of a shotgun and empty spaces and hot tempers. Southerners still distinguishes by obstinacy and perseverance. Probably more so Cohen remained in the flooded area – in spote of fate, feeling some kind of duty to his native land and the graves of relatives.

Beginning of the novel and about the first third is a very good noir, where the hunted becomes the hunter. Cohen is an owner: he keeps an eye on the state of the house, keeps animals, it’s hard for him to part with things. So, appearing in the trailer camp, he insistently repeated one question: where's my things?

Brokedown protagonist makes him interesting and attractive to the reader. He is hard, but sentimental, no stranger to violence, but not a killer. The author manages to make us even love Mariposa and Evan, despite their heinous act in the beginning of the novel.

Rivers, however, is not just a story of revenge. The remaining two thirds of the book is a quest for meaning and rescue, and where this quest will lead, we can only guess. Smith is definitely a top-notch plotter.

Despite the abundance of shooting and car chases in the novel, it is nice that the novel is not sinking to the level of post-apocalyptic thriller. Cohen can handle a shotgun and a car, can survive, but he 's not a superhero, not a machine that can sweep away everyone from its way. No wonder women prisoners in the camp saw in Cohen a savior.

Smith skillfully adapts the characters' psychology to the world. The scene in the café is revealing when a small boy, who does not know life before flooding, does not understand what a waitress do collecting orders. He used to get food from the hands of his "master" or gain it from theft and raids.

The end spoils the whole picture, but we can understand the author, too. In the whole, Rivers is an impressive work, bleak, intriguing, full of humanism.