The Dog Stars

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...