How High We Go in the Dark

More like 3.5 rounded to 4.
It was a very difficult book to read.
At first - because of all the sadness and being so close to an actual pandemic, the book couldn't but make me think what if this really happened. It was just too close to home.
Then - because the characters and their crossovers between chapters started to accumulate and it was a bit difficult to fully grasp their connections.
Overall the book feels a bit underwhelming. The first chapters felt like a terrifying crescendo and I expected something cathartic should happen by the end of the book. The reading got easier after the chapter with the space ship because it became like a normal sci-fi book with little or no connection to the real world and the stories after that were just not that impactful for me (though still very sad). One of the chapters went absolutely over my head, I couldn't see its connection to the rest of the story beyond the fact that it's one more heartbreaking snapshot of someone's life in the wake of the pandemic.
The last chapter was the greatest surprise and the greatest disappointment. It did not make me feel proud for humanity conquering the virus and standing strong together in the face of unthinkable challenge. And it still left lots of questions unanswered.

Intriguing premise, well written, and as I listened to this as an audiobook it was well performed.

Ultimately, I think this wasn't for me. There were a couple of chapters I liked, a couple I really didn't, and some that felt disjointed from the rest.



1 ⭐️ Didn't like it all.
2 ⭐️ Wasn't worth the read, was boring or problematic to me.
3 ⭐️ Fair or good read. Fun but nothing profound. May have interesting characters, themes or plot items. May have flaws but I can overlook them.
4 ⭐️ Good or great read.
5 ⭐️ Perfect or as near to as possible.

Intriguing premise but unfortunately I found it overall bland and repetitive. The short stories format did not work for me.

Not sure whether this was is 3 or 4 stars. This is essentially an extended treatise on grief, although, for me, the emphasis is a bit too much in the “extended”. Some of the prose and stories are beautiful, however by the end I was skimming through the suffering. This is not a book to read if you want to be uplifted, although some of the chapters are rewarding. So a 3.5, but rounded down for unnecessary length and repetition (plus, some of the more sci-fi aspects felt a bit like they had been crowbarred in to justify the story).

Some stories were better than others.

An ancient plague released from the Arctic permafrost through global warming begins to decimate the world. Victim's cells begin to work erratically, kidneys hard at work trying to become lungs, brain cells convinced they need to be building a heart. The body shuts down, skin becomes translucent and those infected slip into a coma and die. Death becomes so prevalent that the funerary industry has completely taken over the banking system giving rise to Mortuary cryptocurrencies and the ubiquitous presence of funerary skyscrapers and malls across the nation's cities.

How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories where each chapter is a meditation on grief and loss in the face of this global pandemic. But it's lovely, hopeful and wild. When the stakes are this high it's all that much more important that there is love and community and the persistent impulse to keep moving forward. When the end of the world comes it's not the doomsday preppers hoarding canned goods that survive. Those who make meaningful connections, retain hope and create neighbourhoods where everyone works together to build abundance - that's where the magic lies.

Nagamatsu connects these disparate stories and callbacks abound with little details travelling across chapters until they resolve into a larger whole. I fell in love with a talking pig and a widowed introvert tentatively inviting his neighbours for a BBQ. I thrilled at the euthanasia theme park and the forensic body farm. I saw the inevitability of death being commercialized with shared urns where neighbours could intermix their ashes to save on money and space, contrasted with elegy hotels where the plasticized dead are preserved as crematories struggle to keep up with demand, and inventive disposal techniques abound like liquifying remains to be turned into ice sculptures to melt into the sea.

But these are just wonderful bits of colour and detail among the more restrained explorations of grief and loss and love that just hit me where I live.

i'm still trying to process this

Aside from being badly executed, this book reads as if it was written before the pandemic happened. Nothing we learned about pandemics in the past few years is included in the book. It's almost surreal how out of touch the book is.

I was hooked onto this book initially, but the more I read, the less engaged I found myself becoming. I had not read the blurb so it came as a bit of a surprise to see a familiar pattern (the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas sans the changes/shifts in linguistic styles).

There's A LOT going on, like each chapter could be considered a book/short story on its own with all its intricacies, independent yet displaying connections to each other. I could sense how ambitiously this novel may have been written, leaning more towards environmental sci-fi, and addressing a lot of the issues prevalent as of today (plus some relatable feelings as well having experienced a global pandemic)

This was a tough one. Made up of short stories, some were good, and some were very boring. I skimmed a lot towards the end. Not great as a whole, but I did enjoy some parts.

The book is a bit on the dark side but I really enjoyed most of the stories as they built upon each other bringing with them hopes and fears of each generation away from the pandemic that occurs. I especially enjoyed the narration in the book.

Too much jumping around to stay in sync with what the author was trying to present and figuring out if a section was ‘now' or reminisce. Something need to have if I want to enjoy a book.

And the stories are waaaay too depressing for me, even pre-2020!

Beautiful series of interconnected, moment-in-time short stories about humanity recovering from a climate-driven plague. I feel I personally got an extra dimension out of it because of the Japanese(-American) cultural references.

This is one of those very well-written books that was extremely hard for me to get through. I gets compared with Cloud Atlas in the blurb, and that certainly makes sense for the layered structure moving through time (Emily St. John Mandel also comes to mind), but stylistically I think it's a little closer to the short stories of Ted Chiang: deep character development and incredible emotional resonance in 25 pages or less. The through-line of the book is death: how we deal with death while living on a dying planet. A LOT of that death is parents grieving children, which is just not something I'm emotionally up for at this point in my life. It's also a post-COVID plague book (the second or third I've read recently), so those triggers are all there too. Still, I think how affected I felt is a testament to Nagamatsu's writing. It's also nice to have a book that while set all over the world, universe really, often comes back to Japanese characters and settings for a perspective SFF rarely gets.

My only criticism was the last chapter which wrapped things up a little more than I liked in a way that felt a little like we changed subgenres, but this is a minor personal taste thing and I don't think diminishes the work as a whole.

And while it's challenging to read so much about death, I do feel like I came away with a lot to think about. I'd still recommend it if you are okay with the trigger warnings for chronic illness, plague, and child death.

A debut novel that is bleak but compassionate. While Sequoia Nagamatsu isn't afraid of delving into dark and uncomfortable topics, the underlying big beating heart of humanity that he seems to truly believe in is ever present.

How High We Go in the Dark is told in a series of semi-interconnected vignettes and tells the story of humanity over hundreds of years after a climate plague begins wiping out huge swathes of the population. Some episodes were stronger than others, but overall the quality was consistent and creative, leading to a surprising but satisfying payoff. The prose is contemplative and at many points beautiful. Maybe on a reread this could be pushed to five stars. For now, 4.5/5.

Read it, decide for yourself if the emotional toll is worth the ending. I found myself thinking it was too soon after Covid because we really haven't collectively grieved it...we just went to our sides and dug in or put our head in the sand. I didn't care for the ending and felt like it cheapened the story. I still recommend you read it.

Brief 2/23/23 update: I just re-read this with a group of friends and loved it just as much the second time as I did the first. It's such a powerful read, and remains one of my favorite books ever (at this point).

Original review: How did I go from being so “wtf is this book” when I started to “holy cow this is one of my 2022 favorites” when I finished? I'm not too sure myself, but there's very few books that can make me feel like crying and make me want to immediately re-read when I'm finished. A book that can do that makes my favorites list automatically.

Going into it, you should know that this is a series of short stories that tell the tale of a plague that was unleashed on the world from Siberia. Rising temperatures and melting permafrost reveal a cave and a dead girl, and it is from this dead girl that the plague originates. Each story advances the plague timeline a bit more, and it's interesting to see how humanity changes in the beginning, middle, end, and post-plague parts of the story. Each chapter is only loosely associated with what came before; aside from the obvious presence of the plague, there's also some character/role/event overlap there to find if you look for it.

Like in most short story books, the chapters can be kind of a mixed bag. I thought the first chapter was far and away the weakest one, but it helps set the stage for what comes after. The second, seventh, ninth, and eleventh stories were all standouts for me, but most of the rest did end up having at least some lasting impression that made me think a bit when I was done. The ending chapter (chapter fourteen for anyone keeping track) especially really turned everything on its head and made me want to re-read the whole book again.

This is an incredibly sad, bleak book, and very heavy topics are discussed. There's hope and happiness of course, but it's first and foremost a plague book so, y'know, manage your expectations. I loved the entire experience.

One of those books I think I need to be smarter to understand. It needs a character list, although I loved the ending.

The last third of the book really slows down. I wouldn't say it was on par with Station Eleven but it had some similar themes. The comparison to it on the book jacket is what made me pick it up. 

Wow.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to put a rating to this one. If I had to, I'd teeter between a three and a four.
I'll return with some more thoughts about this book shortly.

More science-fictiony than I expected, but also very intricate and moving.

This was a really surreal take on a pandemic that wipes out a good portion of the Earth. One example being that they decided to build rollercoasters that would euthanize sick kids that were strapped in without them realising (?!) The first half was pretty depressing because it was just death, death and more death but the second half felt a bit more hopeful.

Giving it a 3.5 since it was written well but felt uncomfortable to read at times, and took me a couple of weeks to come back and finish.

What an exquisitely beautiful book ‘How High We Go in the Dark' is!
What a moving experience to read it!
Thank you, Sequoia Nagamatsu, for gifting the world with it.

A series of short stories that explores the impact of a deadly decades long pandemic, and how the world and people deal with it.

Beginning in the near future it tells very different stories full of fresh ideas about how society and humans change in a world where death and climate change is all around.

The stories often build upon another and have breadcrumb like connections from the very start of the outbreak, to thousand years in the future where humanity travels among the stars.

Some stories are more forgettable than other but concepts like the City of Laughter and other visions of the future will likely stay with me for a long time. I got a lot of „Black Mirror“ vibes while reading, which I consider a good thing.