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A failed poet, on his forays into the wilderness to hunt for deer, his voice becomes lyrical: "The moss I wonder how old.

He can't quite give up his dreams of a better world, of brotherhood, of natural beauty, of grace. Peter Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and Men's Journal, as well as the author of Kook and The Whale Warriors. Contemporary visions of futuristic hell no longer involve an all-powerful Big Brother, but something like its opposite: the barbarian takeover that follows the collapse of centralized power. In the wake of the epidemic, as Hig puts it, "The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice." Indeed, the fiends of The Dog Stars might have wandered over from the anarchic ashland of The Road. Hig and Bangley spend their days fortifying this surreal redoubt against the bands of thugs who wear necklaces of dried vaginas and roam the land, raping and slaughtering. Now he lives in a barricaded compound of abandoned McMansions with his dog and a cynical old codger named Bangley. Once upon a time Hig was a happily married Denver contractor who watched Avatar, ate sushi and loved trout fishing. But it also succeeds as a dark, poetic and funny novel in its own right. With its soulful hero, macabre villains, tender (if thin) love story and action scenes staggered at perfectly spaced intervals, the story unfolds with the vigor of the film it will undoubtedly become. Getting over it already is the challenge facing Hig, the narrator of The Dog Stars, Peter Heller's crackerjack new novel set a decade or so after an epidemic wiped out 99 percent of the U.S. The apocalypse is a given get over it already. Pop culture's embrace of end times has become, if not casual, then matter-of-fact. In the multiplex ( Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) and the art house ( Melancholia), on television ( The Walking Dead) and in fiction ( The Road, The Passage), the world is regularly being smashed by asteroids, ravaged by viruses and overrun by zombies.

We're in the middle of a golden age (if that's the right term for it) of doomsday narratives. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Dog Stars Author Peter Heller