The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life—something like his old life—exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return—not enough fuel to get him home—following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face—in the people he meets, and in himself—is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.

This insomniac's opinion:

The fact that I read this novel at all is a testament to Goodreads, because this is a novel that I would have never chosen on my own. However, it keep popping up in listopia lists and on my friends Goodreads lists and when I saw it at the library, it seemed to be kismet.

Before I tell you what I thought of this novel, a bit of a warning. The author has no regard for punctuation. At all. So if proper placement of punctuation is very important to you, or if utter lack of punctuation bothers you, this may not be the novel for you. I struggled with the lack of quotation marks and commas and the excess of periods, at first. After a few chapters, however, I think this unique punctuation was helpful in "hearing" the protagonist's voice.

As you can imagine, with this being an apocalyptic novel, the world is very bleak and unforgiving. I am someone that  cringes at physical violence, so the scenes where people are killed were very tough for me to stomach. I realize that these scenes were crucial to the novel, however.

I very much enjoyed this novel, somewhat to my surprise. Even in this, the bleakest of worlds, it showed that what matters is friendship, love and connection to others. I always love to find beauty in the midst of suffering.

Worth staying up all night to read?

Yes.

Rating: 4 stars