The Dog Stars

Great story about survival that isn't action packed fighting.

The writing style was very difficult to comprehend. I found myself having to reread nearly every paragraph to really understand the stream of consciousness.

For the genre, I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the natural world (hints of Aldo Leopoldo?). Some sections of this book are very beautifully written indeed.

This was fine. The fragmented, “poetic” (I guess?) writing style would probably have really annoyed me had I continued reading it in print, but I switched to the audiobook - highly recommend doing audiobook if you're going to read this book. But I also think there are other survival/post-apocalyptic books that do the same thing but better.

I think what the author was trying to do was combine nature/outdoors writing with the post-apocalyptic survival genre, which as a concept is what drew me to this book. I did like that aspect, but I felt it could have worked better. Unfortunately, even after I switched to the audiobook, the fragmented, repetitive, run-on writing style made a lot of the descriptive passages really unmemorable and took away their impact.

Also, this is not a criticism of the book but an observation: what a bleak outlook on the world, that in the end people will just all murder each other. The only group of people who were able to live comfortably with more than 3 others without killing each other/killing anyone they saw were some Mennonites. Maybe the author kind of wanted to write a zombie book (killing anyone who approaches would make a little more sense if everyone were trying to eat your brains) but he felt like that wouldn't be taken as seriously so he switched it to humans. Fair enough.

And (this is a criticism) the evidence of the main character's moral “difficulty” with killing people seemed weirdly perfunctory. I don't know. This whole book felt like an unintended exposure of the author's ideas about masculinity.

Last thing, and this is a spoiler: For the first half of the book I really expected Bangley to be a figment of Hig's imagination, or to really just be Hig disassociating, Fight-Club-style. I was kind of disappointed when that was not the case, although maybe that would have been too obvious...

5/5

I could probably give it five stars, for the attention I paid to it and the longing to read more and for its creative formatting. This book expands any writer's ability and possibility. For that, five stars indeed.

A bit like The Road? Maybe in that's it's set in a post apocalyptic world and the writing style is a bit like Cormac McCarthy but not as good. For me it's more like Station Eleven, deals with a yearning for something different, something simpler, something better without ever forgetting. . BUT please do forget everything because.. First rule of dystopian fiction club is... YOU DO NOT KILL THE DOG EVER EVER EVER!!!!

First person account of survival after an influenza pandemic takes out 99.9% of humanity (or something like that). Told in a rambling, disjointed, and almost poetic style.

Well, I don't recommend reading this book while the COVID-19 pandemic is raging, as it deals with a devastating flu pandemic that has very nearly wiped out the human race and, combined with advanced global warming, has made the earth a pretty tough place to live. Nonetheless, a guy, Hig, has found his place, sharing a territory with another guy, Bangley, and they have an odd co-existence. Aside from the premise that was just science fiction when it was written, which is just too horrible to contemplate right now, I found the book pretty melodramatic and overdone. A little too much crying, for example, given how much hardship Hig has endured over the 9 years since civilization went to hell. The voice is interesting, but annoying, with a steady stream of fragments and single words. I guess in the fictional world the disease spread too fast to develop a vaccine–I don't think the word was mentioned once in the book–but I'm grateful our world has one for COVID-19. Hope it works. (I listened to the audio version of the book but also had a print copy in which I could follow along.)

The post-pandemic world the story is set in is fairly standard fare. I think this makes the book stronger. Instead of spending a bunch of time setting up the scenario, the focus is on the characters and how they deal with their new world. It does this very well. The pages flew by. Read it.

My only complaint is the sparse punctuation and the way the author often ignores the normal rules of grammar in favor of internal monologue-style sentence fragments. Sometimes this has the effect of making the story wash by cleanly, as if it was a memory. Too often though, it results in re-reading pieces of dialogue to figure out who was talking and what they meant. The Dog Stars would probably be better with grammar and punctuation left in-tact.

Well, this was certainly a timely read. A killer flu epidemic accompanied by a blood disease has emptied North America (and presumably the whole world) of almost everyone. It is a grim world. The few survivors are mostly prey and predators – sometimes both at once. Even if you aren't a stone-cold killer, you had best be prepared to act like one if you want to survive.
Hig, the protagonist of this story, has learned that lesson well. He and his dog Jasper have teamed up with Bangley, a gun-loving and very competent survivor with a mysterious past. Together they have managed to survive nine years. But Hig yearns for something more, a life less dark. Will he survive to find it?
The writing is beautiful and literary in spite of the dark subject. Heller is very good with descriptive language.
However, at one point he apparently makes a howler of a botanical mistake by placing a warm-weather, low-land species up in the mountains. That took me right out of the story, and I had to stop and reset my brain before continuing. If it was on purpose to indicate climate change perhaps, well ... I still don't buy it because mountains. (I won't say what the plant is. If you don't know, it shouldn't bother you.)
Solid four stars.

I skimmed it – not a huge fan of the writing style, but I felt the main character was well-developed and I loved his relationship with his dog. And of course it felt very “of the moment” with the pandemic we're now living through. I hope our ending is better than the situation described in this book.

I enjoyed a lot about this book, but Heller's stream of consciousness type narrative was a bit broken for me. Still, setting and moments that were vivid and real.

I described The Dog Stars to a friend as a cross between Cormac McCarthy and Jack London. The former for the grim post-apocalyptic setting and the latter for the lyrical descriptions of adventure. Thankfully, this book is not a depressing as The Road. I'm hoping to read more fiction fromPeter Heller in the future... if a super flu doesn't wipe us all out first.

2019 edit: I came back to upgrade my rating from 4 to 5 stars. I still think of this book and Heller's lyrical prose frequently.

Couldn't get past the first few pages. It was all stream of consciousness and just too much work to enjoy.

This book wasn't what I expected. I read the summary and it stuck with me for months. Finally I borrowed it from the library and decided to give it a try. The writing style is.... different. It reminded me of a style that some high school english teacher would praise as being “classic”. It was simply bizarre. It felt like one of those movies where you follow a guy around in the wilderness for awhile, watching his mundane life until this little climax happens. Usually in the form of an animal attack or something like that....

I thought that Hig would be living alone in the wilderness, then not far into the book he's go in search of this mysterious radio call. Even if he spent most of the book flying on his way there, it sounded like an adventure. Instead, the first 1/2 of the book covers his boring life in the wilderness, trying to survive with his aging dog Jasper and his psycho neighbor Bangley. Their conversations don't use quotation marks. That makes it even more confusing to read. Half the time I couldn't tell if they were actually talking or if it was just a conversation in his own head.

The second half of the book focuses on following the radio call. That is... if you can call it following. I wont say more at the risk of spoilers. It really did feel like one of those books that an english teacher praises and most of the students are left going “huh”? Then there are those few oddball students who say they loved the book and want to read more like it.

Would I recommend this? Most likely no. There is a very few select people who I think would enjoy this, but the audience seems pretty narrow. I was excited about the premise, but this left me unsatisfied.

Very well written that drives comparisons to Hemmingway. A ray of light in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in the realm of ‘The Road'. Well done. (movie rights purchased in 2012)

There are books that I want to read, but have no intention of ever actually reading. These books have some appeal, but in my short life I only get to read so many books, so they shall forever remain on the bottom of the to-read pile, never to be read. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars was one of these books. It had too many strikes against it to be really good: an established writer of non-fiction trying his hand at fiction at the age of 53; a post-apocalyptic story; a protagonist who loves flying, fishing, and his dog; a gun-toting misanthrope. If the publishing industry stopped printing books and I lived an extraordinarily long life I figured I'd get around to it eventually... maybe.

So with the publishing industry still going and my old age beginning to show why did I read The Dog Stars now? Bingo. Literally, Bingo. I had to read a book with a blue cover for a reading bingo game. I'd planned originally to fulfill this requirement with Infinite Jest but traipsing through those 1100 pages would certainly slow down my becoming reading-bingo champion of the world (and I want all the glory, dammit!) The Dog Stars was nearby, convenient, and much shorter, so I decided to give it a try. (Don't worry, Joe—if I don't start Infinite Jest by mid-year, I give you permission to defriend me and take whatever action necessary to drag my name through the mud.)

If Hemingway had written a post-apocalyptic novel, I think it would've looked very similar to The Dog Stars. Our protagonist, Hig, is built from the same mold as Nick Adams. He likes the outdoors, fishing, and life. That last one is important because, keep in mind, this is a very, very dark world. It bears great similarity to the world of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. In fact, aside from one world being warm and the other being very cold, I can think of no other difference. So yes, this is a savage book, but it also has heart. Hig may be the last man in the world capable of compassion, but at least he exists.

I liked The Dog Stars much more than I had anticipated. Especially during the first half of the novel, I was drawn in. The world Heller has crafted is probably the most realistic post-apocalyptic world I've seen in literature. Obviously I cannot say what the world will be like after “the apocalypse”—maybe there really will be zombies, white horses, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together—but this story hummed with a realism I felt.

The first half of the novel is five stars, all the way. Unfortunately, the second half didn't quite work the same for me. The world still felt real, but there was something mildly artificial about the story. Hig spent much too much time in location b, discovering himself and... well, I wasn't able to get back on track from that point on. Nevertheless, I largely enjoyed the novel. I've never walked away from such a dark world and said, “I wish I could spend more time there.” Moral of the review: never say never.

I regret that I listened to the audio version of this book instead of reading it with my own eyes. I think I would have better appreciated the writer's style. I liked the premise, plot and characters. The short sentences and tightly edited phrases throughout did not work for me. I wanted some variety in the pace. The audio performance gave this book a monotoned, robotic feel.

This one had some great moments they kept me reading in hopes of more, but overall unremarkable.

Quite a different take on the apocalypse genre. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this book counts more as literature than most any other book I've read recently. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and even got really choked up at one point.

Once I got past the odd writing style, I really enjoyed the story. Party because it takes place in Colorado – where I live – and partly because of the image it paints of a presumably near future without having to go into too much detail.

A serious veer off My Path to Read Happier Books. I have loved reading apocalyptic books since I was a teen, so how could I skip this one, a book that's gotten a lot of great press?

Since nobody really warned me, I'll let you in on a few things. It's dark, dark, dark. It's big B Bleak. There are a few humans left alive on earth. Most of the ones left alive are constantly thinking about how to stab or shoot or trap the many, many threats out there in this new world. Shooting and fighting on every page.

Great writing, of course, and lots of truth, but a major downer.

Story somewhat similar to The Road, but much less grim.

Story somewhat similar to The Road, but much less grim.