‘The Dog Stars’ novelist Peter Heller / Remembering rock critic Dave Marsh

Fresh Air - NPR

In this Fresh Air episode, novelist Peter Heller discusses his post-apocalyptic debut novel 'The Dog Stars,' which inspired a film directed by Ridley Scott. Heller reflects on how his experiences

Key takeaways

The novel emerged from Heller's fascination with environmental collapse and mass extinction, inspired by conversations with a paleobotanist friend.

Main topics

Post-apocalyptic fiction
Survivalism vs. emotional resilience

Notable quotes

"I keep the beast running." – The opening line of 'The Dog Stars,' referring to Hig's old Cessna aircraft.

Conclusion

Peter Heller's 'The Dog Stars' transcends typical apocalyptic storytelling by centering emotional depth,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This message comes from Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin. In this podcast, the Today Show anchor talks with A-listers and athletes about the moments that shaped them. Listen, and you might get a fresh perspective. Search Glass Half Full wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (0:15) This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The Dog Stars, a new film from Ridley Scott starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, is an apocalyptic drama about two men struggling to survive after a virus has wiped out much of the world's population. Here's a scene from the movie. Elordi is speaking to Brolin's character. Speaker 2 (0:35) This world fits you, Bing. Wake up, defend, survive. I think you were ready for it ten years before it hit. You like this s***. Speaker 2 (0:57) I was a f***ing canic. No, I f***ed. When I wasn't doing that, I was kissing my wife, playing with my dog, and wondering every day how I got s***. Speaker 5 (1:22) The Dog Stars, which opens in theaters next week, is adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Heller. Heller knows something about survival himself. He's an experienced outdoorsman and adventure writer who's gone to some pretty remote places and done some pretty dangerous things. He wrote Hell or High Water about an expedition to an unfathomably deep river gorge in Tibet. The Dog Stars was his first novel and became a bestseller. His other novels include The River, Celine, The Painter, and his latest, The Orchard. Peter Heller holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in both fiction and poetry. Let's listen to some of the interview I recorded with Heller in 2012, when The Dog Stars was first published. Well, Peter Heller, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. Now, this is your first novel. You've written a lot of nonfiction. Why a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has collapsed? Speaker 7 (2:21) Yeah, I'm not sure why. I know why I wanted to write a novel. I've been writing nonfiction for many years. And, you know, when you write a nonfiction book, you know, of course, I always know what's going to happen next. And I know what the ending is going to be. And I just didn't want to know what was going to happen next. And so I went to the coffee shop where I write and I sat down and I began with the first line. So I didn't even, to tell you the truth, know that it was going to be a post-apocalyptic story when I started. Speaker 5 (2:50) Wow. The first line is, I keep the beast running. The beast refers to an old Cessna aircraft. That's how you started? Speaker 7 (2:57) Yeah. And I mean, I know that this stuff about the unraveling of the ecosphere and the apocalypse is something that I've been thinking about a lot. I write a lot about environmental issues. And I have a dear friend. He's a paleobotanist. And what he does is Look at 70 million-year-old fossil leaves. And his specialty is the K-T boundary. That's the geologic layer that represents the time between when there were a lot of dinosaurs and then when there weren't any. So this guy, Kirk, is an aficionado of extinction, you might say. And we eat breakfast now and then, and we always talk about... This sixth great mass extinction that we're in the middle of right now that scientists are talking about a lot. And we always end up imagining what it'll be like when that apocalypse, this unraveling, begins to affect human society and what it'll look like. And so those themes have been on my mind. And so when I sat down to write, I think they had to be central to the book. Speaker 5 (4:07) You know, I had my own. notion about this, which is that, you know, as I read about what you've done, I mean, you've been quite an outdoorsman. You've been, you know, an expedition kayaker. You've gone to some incredibly remote and sometimes dangerous places. And I wondered if you were at times in places where it might have felt like you were one of the last people on Earth. Speaker 7 (4:28) Oh, yeah. You know, that's a wonder. I hadn't thought of it that way. Speaker 7 (4:33) I was thinking this morning about sometimes I just, the wonderful thing about, you know, traveling to these places and taking these expeditions is you have these memories and these images that sort of, you know, they form your interior landscape and you can come back to them. And this morning I was thinking about the Sangpo Gorge in eastern Tibet. And, you know, it's like the deepest gorge in the world. It's right in the middle of the high Himalayas and it's so deep that. It's subtropical and there are tigers in there and, you know, four species of leopards and 200 species and counting of rhododendrons. You know, I was on this expedition that went through there and it did. You know, it felt like the end. end of the world or maybe like some sort of Shangri-La, some sort of, you know, imagined place on Earth that no one had ever been to before. And, you know, on some of these trips, actually, you know, when you get into the kayak, you don't even know. You stretch the spray skirt on over the cockpit and you don't know if that's the last time you'll ever be doing that. And you sort of pray that it's not. And so I think that that might have informed some of it for sure. Speaker 5 (5:34) Right. You know, one of the things that I thought – I just – I really enjoyed reading this. It's told in the first person. Your character, Hig, is this guy who was a pilot. And he's at an airport with another guy who's very different from him. Let's talk about these two characters. First, your character, Hig, the one who tells the story. Tell us about him. Speaker 7 (5:53) Well, he's – he was a contractor. He was married, very happily married. whose wife named Melissa, she was seven months pregnant when this super flu hit and hit, you know, across as a pandemic, world pandemic. And so that was their first child. So in this flu pandemic, he lost his wife, he lost his unborn child, he lost everything. And In his previous life, before that, he had wanted to be a writer. He had written a bunch of poetry and was kind of a failed poet and, you know, had to go to work. And so, you know, he did this job building houses. And he's a big guy. He's a very tough and formidable dude. But, you know, he still has that sensibility of, you know, he just loves to read poetry more than anything. He has a sensitivity towards beauty and nature, and he loves to fly fish. That's what he loves to do more than anything. And, you know, in this situation, in this post-apocalyptic time that he finds himself in, he'll still, at great risk to himself, he and his dog Jasper will head into the mountains just to go fishing. Speaker 5 (7:07) Right. Now, they end up at this little rural airport called Erie. Is it a real place? Speaker 7 (7:13) Yeah, it's where I... keep my plane, the old 56. Speaker 5 (7:18) A 56 Cessna, an old plane. And because of the circumstances, there are fuel tanks that are solar powered so there's enough fuel that he can continue to fly. The other guy at the airport is the one he's destined to perhaps spend eternity with, this character Bangley. Tell us about Bangley. Speaker 7 (7:38) Bangley's an enigma. He shows up a few months after everything hit the fan with a trailer. full of guns and ammo. And he's just a really mean gun nut. And you get the sense that he's been waiting for this his whole life, this sort of survival situation. And, you know, throughout the whole beginning of the book, you know, and as I was writing it, I mean, I was, you know, I was discovering these characters as I was writing it, just as Hig was. And so it was really fun. You know, Bangley is a tough nut to crack. He doesn't give away much. And his whole deal is about survival. It is about... dotting your eyes and crossing every T and about redundancy and about never slipping up and never making a mistake and never letting some situation get out of hand or letting the other guy win. Speaker 5 (8:24) Trevor Burrus And treating every other human being you may encounter as a threat. Speaker 7 (8:28) Peter Speaker 5 (8:28) Robinson Yeah, Speaker 7 (8:29) definitely. He's a crusty dude for sure. Speaker 5 (8:32) Trevor Speaker 7 (8:32) Burrus Speaker 5 (8:32) So tell us, what's the symbiotic relationship? Why does Bangley accept your character, Hig, into his little world? Speaker 7 (8:40) Well, you know, I think on the surface, you know, explicitly, it's because Higgs has this airplane and he knows how to fly it. And every day after, you know, there's a lot of action in the book. And in one of these sort of attacks that nearly cleans their clock, you know, Bangley sort of realizes that it's Higgs. Daily patrols in his old plane, you know, he circles out towards the mountain front, which is eight miles away, and then he circles around. He does a—out to the south and then the east and to the north. He has a 30-mile radius, and it's sort of a day's walk for an intruder. So after his patrol, he knows that they're safe for probably—for 24 hours. And it's that patrol, that perimeter that Higg maintains that— you know, keeps him alive, you know, in Bangley's book. He's useful then. Speaker 5 (9:35) And your character, Higg, is not happy just to stay alive, right? He's always kind of reaching for something else. Speaker 7 (9:46) Yeah, I mean... Speaker 7 (9:50) Higgs' challenge is to find a reason to stay alive and to stay connected with the things he loves. And I think that's why I named the book The Dog Stars because Higgs sleeps out every night with his dog Jasper. They huddle up and sleep out under the stars. And every night Higgs names the constellations. And he used to have a book of stars, but now he doesn't. Speaker 7 (10:14) He remembers some of the constellations, you know, Orion and the Big Dipper and the chariot. But a lot of them he doesn't, so he makes them up. And they're usually animals. And he makes one up for his wife and for the little angel, he calls it, which was his child. And he makes one up for Jasper, his dog. And it's his way of reinventing the world and also staying connected to the things he loves. So that's his challenge every day is to find a reason to live. find joy, to find some richness. And I think that's what makes them so interesting. It's not just about, you know, finding the calories to stay alive. Speaker 5 (10:50) And Bangley's reaction to every move is, that's too risky, make sure you're protected, get the right angles on an intruder, that kind of a thing. Speaker 7 (10:59) Exactly. Yeah, they're working, you know, they have two different tracks they're working on every day. And so their relationship is very interesting. Hig doesn't like to kill. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm like Hig in that way. I mean, I love to fly fish almost more than anything. And I hunt elk and I just can't stand killing things. I mean, if I see a spider, you know, flailing on the surface of the water, I'll go to great effort to save him sometimes. Don't tell my buddies. But Hig is like that, too. You know, he just he's in this situation where they do get attacked and he does sometimes have to step up and he. He just can't stand it, whereas Bangley, you know, he relishes that. And, you know, he thinks Higg lives in the past too much. You know, a lot of the book is Higg's interior monologue, his memories of the past. There's a lot. There's layering of his memories of his marriage, of, you know, things he used to love to do and his impressions. And so he's in his head a lot.