Reading Notes: Dog Stars by Peter Heller

I really enjoyed The Dog Stars by Peter Heller recently. The main character is a pilot named Hig. As the book jacket says, “Hig's wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley.”

As apocalypses go, this one doesn’t break any new ground. But, and this is not a spoiler, Hig is also a trout fisherman. So, I picked it up for the cocktail of post-apocalyptic aviation and trout fishing. But I stayed for the book’s voice. I wrote about it at greater length here. Heller throws the grammar out of the window of his main character’s beat-up Cessna—a lot of fragments and run ons, many two or three-word sentences, and no quotation marks. Then, after getting you used to a run of the sparse stuff, he hits you with a well-placed, winding lyric of a sentence. So good. If you like Cormac McCarthy, this book might be for you. It’s not for everyone. But Heller puts down some wonderful prose.