Looking For Love after the Apocalypse

The Dog Stars is the tale of Hig (Big Hig if you want two names), living in a post-Apocalyptic world. The chief virtue of the book is the style.

In his former life, Hig was a contractor who really loved poetry. The contractor bit comes in handy in a post-Apocalyptic world. The poetry bit comes in handy in writing the novel.

Open up any page, and you see the style. The paragraphs are all separated by double spacing. Why? Each paragraph is like a miniature poem. Not rhyming or scanning poems (this is no Paradise Lost), just prose written with poetic sensibilities, or at least pseudo-poetic sensibilities.

Picking a paragraph at random (literally opening the book to see the first paragraph that pops off the page):
(It’s a rumination of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her companion when her plane vanished:)

Starvation. Slowly burning through time like a fire in wet wood. Attenuating to bone, to walking bones, then one dies, then the other. Or attacked by passing islanders maybe better.

That is a pretty good example of the style. Staccato sentences, ignoring rules of grammar and punctuation. A mix of paragraphs advancing the plot and pausing to ruminate. Lots of rumination. Easy to read. Flows along. Writing like this. Annoying. Could be. But not always.

At a minimum, the style has potential to be the backbone of a really good novel.

But, what about the plot?

Post-Apocalyptic literature is a genre unto itself. And, a popular genre at that. It’s worth thinking about why. Suppose you are writing a post-Apocalyptic book. What do you need to do?

First, obviously, the world as we know has to come to an end. It never really matters much how. In The Dog Stars the culprit is Lawrence Livermore Lab…a nice safe organization to blame in our politically charged age. (You can date post-Apocalyptic books by looking at the cause of the Apocalypse.) So, no need to think much about how the world ended.

Now that the world has ended, you decide on The Problem. The hero, usually someone like an idealized version of the author, has to navigate the landscape. There is no lack of problems to overcome in this new world. So, you’ll have to choose which problems you want your hero to overcome.

Figuring out how to overcome The Problem is exactly the appeal of post-Apocalyptic literature. The Reader gets placed in the position of seeing the problem along with the protagonist and then imagining how to solve the puzzle. The Reader gets to cheer the protagonist for doing the right thing and wince when the protagonist fails.

Your novel can either be hopeful or terrifying, depending on which problems your hero has to solve. You can have a whole story about overcoming the problems of survival, how to get food and shelter. You can spend the whole novel solving technological problems. You can rebuild a whole civilization. You can, on the other had have roving bands of evil—wild animals, depraved gangs of young men, zombies—which your hero can never quite completely defeat, but must find a way to overcome. Lots of options here.

What option does Heller pick? By the start of the novel we are nine years after the Apocalypse. Hig has already solved all the problems of survival. He lives at a rural airport with a dog, Jasper. He has a neighbor, Bangley, with whom he regularly interacts. Fortunately Bangley is one of those omnipotent action heroes straight out of every Rambo-like movie you ever watched. Lots of food, water, electricity and an airplane which Hig uses to fly around to check out the surrounding area.

So, what is Hig’s problem? He needs companionship. Jasper is great and all, but he is, well, a dog. Bangley is useful and all—he has a godlike ability to kill off all those marauding bands of rovers—but he is, well, curmudgeonly and hard to like. There is a local Mennonite family which Hig stops in to see on occasion, but (alas) they have the deadly disease which seems to have been fatal for everyone other than this family, and, well, that puts a damper on the relationship.

Hig desperately wants human contact. He misses his wife and unborn child, but mostly tries to ignore that fact. It’s not that there are no other people in this world; it’s just that everyone who ever wanders into the airport or the surrounding area has to be shot. I guess nice people never wander around the country looking for love.

After half the novel has passed, Hig finally gets around to doing what it was pretty obvious he would do at some point—why it took half the novel, I have no idea—he finds some other nice people. Insert sounds of Joy.

A novel like this could work. A novel like this written in the style it was written could work really well. But, it fails. Why?

None of the people in this novel even rise to the level of two-dimensional. This is not a fatal flaw for a post-Apocalyptic novel, by the way. If the novel is about solving technological problems, the people can be completely devoid of depth and the novel can still be quite good.

But, if the puzzle the novel is trying to frame is how to find companionship in the world, then you really need to have people in it that are actually three-dimensional. Instead we get a few stock characters who Hig somehow instantly knows are good people and then a bunch of soon-to-die evil people who live a couple of pages before being shot.

The development of Hig’s relationships with his new found friends is truly ham-handed. Cringe-inducing, to be honest. Similarly, even Bangley gets his moment of utterly painful to read “character development.”

Thus a novel with potential because of its style dies due to the fact that Heller apparently has no idea how to craft people. Oddly, if Heller had set out to solve a different problem in his post-Apocalyptic world, this novel could have been vastly better. The unwritten prequel to this novel would surely have been better.

What about the larger puzzle? In the post-Apocalyptic world, how great is the need for companionship?

It will surprise precisely nobody when I say that I think I could be quite content living in an abandoned town with a large library. (There is a Twilight Zone episode about a guy like that. Not Exactly a Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t end well.) Yes, I would terribly miss all the people I currently know and love. But, I am not at all sure I would feel compelled to seek out replacement friends and family.

That, I suppose, is the greatest disappointment of The Dog Stars. It tries to convince me of the need to find a family in a post-Apocalyptic world, but it fails to even make me wonder about the idea.