The Dog Stars
A flu has killed almost everyone. Nine years on, Hig lives out of a small abandoned airport in Colorado with his dog Jasper and a paranoid, gun-heavy neighbor named Bangley, flying patrols in a 1956 Cessna and fishing streams where the trout are dying from an unnamed blood disease. He is grieving a wife lost to the flu and a country that no longer exists, and staying alive mostly out of loyalty to the dog. Then, during a long-range flight, he picks up a faint transmission on an old tower frequency, three years old and fading, and against his better judgment he decides to follow it. Peter Heller's novel, written in a clipped, lyrical prose that mirrors its narrator's damaged mind, is one of the more tender and beautifully written entries in twenty-first-century post-apocalyptic fiction.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Dog Stars
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Nine years after a superflu killed most of humanity, a man named Hig keeps a small Colorado airfield with his old dog Jasper and a heavily armed neighbor. A static-broken voice on the radio sends him on a long flight.
The Dog Stars was written by Peter Heller and published in 2012. It was Heller's debut novel after a long career as a nonfiction adventure writer. Heller has since written The Painter, Celine, The River, and The Last Ranger.
Yes. The Dog Stars is a literary post-apocalyptic novel about a man, his dog, and his prepper neighbor surviving years after a flu pandemic. The tone is more elegiac than action-driven.
The Dog Stars is 327 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dog Stars takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Dog Stars is a standalone novel by Peter Heller, not part of a series.
The Dog Stars is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.