The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

After a terrible epidemic basically wipes out human-kind in North America, two men, Hig and Bangley, forge a hardscrabble existence at a county airport in the shadow of the Rockies in Peter Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars.

An odd couple drawn together for safety and by circumstance, Hig and Bangley spend most of their days securing their turf, patrolling their perimeter from, as Hig with understatement puts it, "intruders." Hig and Bangley are a team; Hig does most the recon, Bangley does most of the killiing. Hig does his his recon flying a 1956 Cessna 182, which he calls the beast, over about a thirty square mile tract.  Bangley does his part using the veritable arsenal of weapons which he came with. When, he showed up out of the blue one day in an old truck.Hig is our narrator, or journaler, and supplies precious little in the way of background on either himself or Bangley. Heller is after a ground-zero situation.

The intruders who come to Hig and Bangley's doorsetp are desperate, fierce and scary people who seem intent on killing and taking. After the contagion, civilization has all but collapsed and mankind has returned to a primitive, every man for himself state.  Of course, in all cases, neither the reader nor Hig can be sure of the intruders intentions or whether they are uniformily predatory. When others intrude on the little homestead Hig and Bangley have established,  Bangley, ("a mean gun nut" according to Hig) ensures that he and Hig shoot first and never ask any questions later. Although, homestead might be the wrong word. Hig sleeps outside a house, under the stars, claiming not to want to be trapped by a likely target for marauders. Hig has doubts but never lets those get in the way of the killing, in part because he's afraid he might be next if he were to argue for practicing a bit more discrimination.

The marauders who come are equal parts pathetic and frightening. There is "a young girl, a scarecrow" with a pocketknife who tries to ambush him from behind only to be mowed down by Bangley. There are scary bands of primitively armed men, anywhere from six to eight, usually large and fierce. Think pirates. These bands would potentially present problems if any were ever as well-armed as Bangley. This is definitely a book that the NRA will love.

Hig and Bangley's relationship is a strained one. Misanthropic Bangley seems to relish the killing. Its almost as if this bleak, isolated and red-in-tooth and claw world is a dream set-up for him. Hig on the other hand is less well adjusted to his existence and still feels some need to exercise his  humanity. Every once in a while, initially unbeknownst to Bangley, he makes calls on a large Mennonite family ten miles south of them. The family is suffering from "the blood," a blood disease that arose in response to the flu that annihilated the vast majority of people.

When Bangley finds out that Hig is doing this, he argues, "you want to get this far and die of the blood?" Beginning to question his survivor's good fortune, Hig thinks "This Far. Bangley and Jasper [Hig's dog] and a low fat diet."

Heller's novel is a philosophical one, begging several questions the question; what makes life worth-living? Can you imagine a case when too much would be taken away? What would be that case? How does one go forward after disasters that seem to strip all worth away?

As the book begins, Hig has been eking it out with Bangley at the airport for almost nine years. His daily routine seems to require a great deal of mental and emotional effort. Memory can't be indulged; for the most part, Hig avoids thinking about his comfortable life before the plague and the wife and child-to-be he lost in it. Occasionally, he goes off with Jasper and hunts and fishes, although much of the game is gone. The beauty he sees in nature now only confuses him in the face of all the senseless disaster he's lived through. He asks Bangley, "if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?"

Yet, he persists, going forward powered by a slender hope. At one point, he asks himself, "Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months?" He's assumed a posture of hope in the hopes it will create a bit of magic.

Waiting with hope eventually wears then and he decides a desperate acts is in order. Spurred by a mysterious radio signal he received from Grand Junction three years before, he decides to get in his plane and fly there, despite the fact that he's not sure what he'll find or whether he'll find gas he can use to fly back to Bangley and his "home." He needs more and he's willing to risk all to find it.

Predictably and improbably, he finds a woman, Cima. And, of course, she's not only sane, but sweet, smart and fantastic looking. He also discovers where the call from Grand Junction came from, but what was a source of hope proves to have sprung from something considerably bleaker. But, all this is the rest of the story, and I won't spoil it.  Regarding the probability of there being a lovely, sane, smart women wandering out in the wasteland....maybe I just don't recognize the possibilities that lie in even the bleakest situations.

The opening of the book is better than the questing journey outward that dominates it's close. The way the two men craft a life and manufacture a reason for being out of the thinnest air is fascinating. The rest of the story seems contrived. Heller creates a situation that poses some really interesting questions, he puts his characters in a box, but then takes the easy way out and gives them an unrealistic way out. I'll leave it there to spare those who might want to read the book.

It's a page-turner. For the most part, Heller writes in a spare, elliptical style. As a character, Hig is a bit of a mess; he's gone through hell and back but is still, at heart, an all-American dude. He is sensitive, attuned to nature, super-handy, a great outdoorsman. He is also literary: when he makes one final trip to the house he'd shared with Melissa, it's to retrieve a volume of William Stafford poems. He's great company, but sometimes he doesn't convince or add up. He tends to gush at points, and some of his thoughts seem kind of like FB posts, self-involved recitations of likes and dislikes. He seems to sometimes veer suddenly between the macho and the maudlin

Still, the book asks the big questions and begins to answer some of them. What are our reason for being? How resilient are they? And, the book presents a welcome view of nature as an ambivalent force. Hig is clearly enamored by the outdoors, but can he see it quite the same way after nature, in the form of a bug, basically strips him of all he possesses? I wish Heller had delved into this area a bit more. And, if nothing else, the death of Jasper the dog will strike a chord with any animal lover.