There are post-apocalyptic novels about survival. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars is a dreamy, internal monologue about love fading and reigniting.

Nine years after a flu pandemic wipes out most of humanity, Hig lives at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper and a heavily armed survivalist named Bangley. They hunt, patrol, and occasionally kill anyone who gets too close. Yet despite the setup, this is not really an action-driven apocalypse novel; it could have easily turned into Mad Max, but it goes in a different direction.

The author fills the novel with empty skies, glistening rivers, dense forests, and abandoned fragments of civilisation slowly being reclaimed by nature. There is a strange, beautiful and at times cringy poetry running through the book. Hig's fragmented narration gradually becomes the novel's greatest strength, capturing loneliness, memory and grief in a way that feels painfully intimate, like thoughts half-lost in radio static. It’s at odds with Bangley and Pop’s pragmatic live-or-let-die attitude.

The relationship between Hig and Bangley gives the novel much of its initial tension. Bangley embraces the harsh logic of survival; Hig still searches for connection in a world that rewards that kind of softness with death. Much of the novel quietly asks how people continue building human relationships in an isolated, uncaring world, where survival is the first and only thought.

The book is also an extraordinarily slow burn. For long stretches, very little seems to happen beyond leisurely patrols, trout fishing trips and flights across the mountains. Yet that deliberate pace makes a hopeful radio transmission — the possibility of other survivors — feel like a beacon on fire in the distance. Something that Hig risks everything for.

What also struck me was the absence of zombies or monstrous infected. Lesser versions of this story would almost certainly have reached for them. But zombies would have changed the tone completely, turning the novel into a survival thriller built around an imaginative threat. Here, the danger comes from loneliness, memory and damaged people trying to endure the psychological pressure of an empty world. The human antagonists remain frightening because they still feel recognisably human. I still think this is a weak area of the book; maybe I’m an eternal optimist, but surely not everyone can be a rabid killer, intent on stealing, raping and destroying. With so much land and so few people, it would be easier to thrive in a lower-tech society, with space to grow, hunt, and flourish. It feels unrealistic and one-dimensional.

This is a thoughtful, melancholy novel more interested in atmosphere and emotional endurance than plot. But it has something, despite its almost frustrating internal world view and leaves an impression.

I gave it 7.0 out of 10

TTRPG Thoughts

This made me think of a campaign sitting somewhere between Mutant: Year Zero, Twilight: 2000 and Simon Stålenhag's The Electric State, but with mechanics that actively support societal collapse and difficult human choices beneath the survival action.

For the emotional side — loneliness, fragile romance, the need to keep building human connection against impossible odds — I could imagine elements of PbtA woven into the structure. The best moments in The Dog Stars are not the firefights, but the pauses between them: conversations in empty rooms, memories surfacing like old photographs left too long in the sun, the sound of a hopeful voice breaking through static on the radio.

For the moral tension, especially the gradual shift towards Bangley's ruthless worldview, something like Dogs in the Vineyard feels like a good spiritual partner.

And then there is the action. The novel occasionally erupts into sudden violence: raids, gunfire, desperate escapes. Those scenes feel at the brutal end of YZE - Twilight: 2000 or Blade Runner — grounded survival action where every bullet, every decision and every litre of fuel matters, a wound may not be fatal in itself, but with a shortage of resources, infection, complications can prove fatal in the long term.