Just when I had falsely assumed that Cormac McCarthy had given us the last word on the post-apocalyptic novel, along comes Peter Heller with something fresh. Written in an unusual, abridged stream of consciousness style format, Heller's prose is lean and muscular. His protagonist, Hig, (or "Big Hig") is a sensitive guy who has survived a nameless pandemic that has wiped away the better part of the world's population. Despite the fact that he's daily living in a combat zone, tenaciously guarded by he and a paramilitaristic partner, Bangley (who's name becomes increasingly appropriate as the novel progresses), he has not allowed himself to become completely hardened by this brave new world. Remembering the gentleness and poetry of his life before with a sense of longing, he reads, cooks, tends his garden, and daily flies a perimeter with his canine co-pilot but, unable to escape a haunting message picked up years earlier on his Cessna's radio, he chooses, one day, to fly away from the safety of his new home, past the point of no return, risking everything, to discover the source of the mysterious transmission.

It may take a few pages to adjust to the unusual prose style but, in reflection, it's not only appropriate to the work but difficult to imagine that the reader could be as submerged in The Dog Stars had it been written any other way. It might be gritty and absorbing, but the real beauty of this novel is its cautious analysis of the guarded way people relate to each other in a world where close human relationships are increasingly uncommon. A terrific book on many different levels.