Additionally, Heller’s love of all things Colorado becomes very apparent with his prolonged and repeated descriptions of the mountains and his love for fishing. My feelings of discontent with The Dog Stars primarily reside with its ending, which boldly and abruptly broadcasts "sequel." Stories that end this way sacrifice their completeness for something that looks and feels a lot like marketing, and marketing is not literature.
Heller explores this choice throughout the novel and delivers his opinion as the book progresses. The result boils down to a choice between self-sufficiency and community. He then searches out the a fundamental source for our present-day strife under his petri dish conditions. His post apocalyptic world allows him to remove all the people and in doing so, he removes the countless nuanced opinions on political philosophy. There‘s also a philosophical side to this novel where Heller explores today’s political divide between people. It got under my skin and I could feel the action.
The result is a style that peaks at critical moments with short, incomplete sentences which communicate impact. Heller, however, takes this style one step further and occasionally digresses into what I would describe as being poetic. He promotes intimacy with his reader through an abandonment of punctuation, which is similar to the style of Cormac McCarthy. His prose exhibit the sparseness of Ernest Hemingway. It’s Heller’s ability to write, to tell his story, that makes this novel special. Even guns, in America, are depicted as being in short supply, but it’s Heller’s world. This aspect of the novel is a bit hard to believe given the vast amount of resources that would have been left behind for the survivors under such a scenario. Those that survived now try to kill each other off, as if our natural state of survival depends on killing every other survivor that you come across. The world is nine years into the aftermath of a virus that suddenly and almost completely kills off humanity. This novel is very much a violent adventure novel.
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