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How High We Go in the Dark
Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 18, 2022
About the author
Sequoia Nagamatsu
10 books1,502 followersSEQUOIA NAGAMATSU is the author of the National Bestselling novel, HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection, WHERE WE GO WHEN ALL WE WERE IS GONE (2016). His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Tin House, Iowa Review, Lightspeed Magazine, and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, and has been listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading and the Best Horror of the Year.
Other honors include a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and shortlist inclusions for The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Ursula K Le Guin Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, as well as long list inclusions for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. He was educated at Grinnell College (BA) and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (MFA), and he teaches creative writing at Saint Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He is originally from O’ahu, Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the writer Cole Nagamatsu, their cat Kalahira, their real dog Fenris, and a Sony Aibo robot dog named Calvino.
More at SequoiaNagamatsu.com. Follow him on Twitter @SequoiaN or on Instagram @Sequoia.Nagamatsu
Other honors include a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and shortlist inclusions for The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Ursula K Le Guin Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, as well as long list inclusions for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. He was educated at Grinnell College (BA) and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (MFA), and he teaches creative writing at Saint Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He is originally from O’ahu, Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the writer Cole Nagamatsu, their cat Kalahira, their real dog Fenris, and a Sony Aibo robot dog named Calvino.
More at SequoiaNagamatsu.com. Follow him on Twitter @SequoiaN or on Instagram @Sequoia.Nagamatsu
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 9,464 reviews
January 24, 2022
An ambitious and intricate novel in stories about the ways everything in our world... no, our universe, are intimately connected. At the outset, scientists in Siberia are trying to determine whether newly uncovered organisms will cause harm to the human race, and from there, we see how a global plague unfolds. The connective tissues between each story are imaginative and fascinating and the payoff in the end is unexpected but satisfying. On a sentence level, the writing in this book is simply beautiful. I love the slow, meditative quality of much of the prose. It makes for a very immersive, hypnotic read. And still so much happens. The story is told from so many different angles. The novel is uncannily prescient.
Read
December 18, 2021**Forgot to say, obtained from NG etc.etc.*
I have no idea how to even begin talking about this book.
It kind of doesn’t help that it opens with a delirious letter from the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury telling you how this book is all that and a bag of chips, which is just one of those moments when you remember how so many different worlds publishing encompasses. I mean, never in a gazillion years is the editor-in-chief of a publishing house going to lose his ever-loving shit over something from a romance imprint, no matter how artistically and financially successful it is.
Anyway, I was off-put and resentful, because the business of selling art is complicated, and too much emphasis on the selling can make it hard to respond authentically to the art, and good God could I hear the grinding of capitalism’s ever-turning wheels as I skimmed past the introductory orgasm of the editor-in-chief.
But then.
Oh my, this book. It is a genuinely remarkable piece work.
And, honestly, I’m not sure how, because a book about a pandemic—even a SFnal one—should by rights feel crass and exploitative at the moment, shouldn’t it? Instead of harrowing, cathartic, and ultimately deeply, profoundly hopeful? I think it helps that the plague in the book, released by melting Arctic ice, has absolutely nothing in common with any other plagues the globe may or may not have recently experienced. It’s not even airborne so there are no reference to masks or any of the other COVID-inspired changes to our current day-to-day lives. Basically, and this was a narrative high-wire act that left me breathless with admiration, it managed to be emotionally resonant while also feeling very much its own thing.
The book as a whole consists of a series of stories—moments in time—between loosely connected characters as the plague runs its course. This starts from its initial release in the Arctic in the not-too-distant future and then deeper, and further, into a world still recognisable and yet utterly changed. While several of the latter stories take on more explicitly science-fictiony themes, especially as the narrative comes full circle with itself, what it never loses its focus on people and the connections between them (the connections, I suppose, between everything).
I guess the closest comparison for me—and probably one that will come up often—is Cloud Atlas. But (and I say this as someone who loves that book) imagine a Cloud Atlas less interested in showing you how clever it is, and more interested in showing you its heart.
I won’t lie, this is a harrowing read (especially in the wake of our own pandemic) and, wow, is there a lot of death in it, but it’s also so unexpectedly tender. While fear and loss and destruction sweep the world, we read about characters navigating troubled families, dealing with loss, falling in love, creating art, seeking connection. Something I found deeply fascinating about the book was its exploration of all the ways society might change if death on a massive scale became a long-term constant in everyone’s lives, particularly its inevitable entanglement with capitalist enterprise. There’s something inevitably bleak about these ideas (for example the eulogy hotel chains that allow the bereaved to efficiently, and for the right price luxuriously, say farewell to their loved one or the euthanasia theme park aimed at giving doomed children one last wonderful day) but what stops the book tumbling into abstract dystopia or a gruelling grimfest is the way each story unerringly finds its human centre. It’s a frankly incredible accomplishment in terms of narrative precision, thematic control and sharp, economical characterwork.
How High We Go In The Dark is an intense and powerful read that finds beauty amidst horror, compassion amongst destruction, hope in the depths of despair, and humanity, always, in everything. I kind of felt like I was getting my heart turned inside out for much of the experience but this book left me dazzled and moved, and perhaps even a little bit changed.
I have no idea how to even begin talking about this book.
It kind of doesn’t help that it opens with a delirious letter from the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury telling you how this book is all that and a bag of chips, which is just one of those moments when you remember how so many different worlds publishing encompasses. I mean, never in a gazillion years is the editor-in-chief of a publishing house going to lose his ever-loving shit over something from a romance imprint, no matter how artistically and financially successful it is.
Anyway, I was off-put and resentful, because the business of selling art is complicated, and too much emphasis on the selling can make it hard to respond authentically to the art, and good God could I hear the grinding of capitalism’s ever-turning wheels as I skimmed past the introductory orgasm of the editor-in-chief.
But then.
Oh my, this book. It is a genuinely remarkable piece work.
And, honestly, I’m not sure how, because a book about a pandemic—even a SFnal one—should by rights feel crass and exploitative at the moment, shouldn’t it? Instead of harrowing, cathartic, and ultimately deeply, profoundly hopeful? I think it helps that the plague in the book, released by melting Arctic ice, has absolutely nothing in common with any other plagues the globe may or may not have recently experienced. It’s not even airborne so there are no reference to masks or any of the other COVID-inspired changes to our current day-to-day lives. Basically, and this was a narrative high-wire act that left me breathless with admiration, it managed to be emotionally resonant while also feeling very much its own thing.
The book as a whole consists of a series of stories—moments in time—between loosely connected characters as the plague runs its course. This starts from its initial release in the Arctic in the not-too-distant future and then deeper, and further, into a world still recognisable and yet utterly changed. While several of the latter stories take on more explicitly science-fictiony themes, especially as the narrative comes full circle with itself, what it never loses its focus on people and the connections between them (the connections, I suppose, between everything).
I guess the closest comparison for me—and probably one that will come up often—is Cloud Atlas. But (and I say this as someone who loves that book) imagine a Cloud Atlas less interested in showing you how clever it is, and more interested in showing you its heart.
I won’t lie, this is a harrowing read (especially in the wake of our own pandemic) and, wow, is there a lot of death in it, but it’s also so unexpectedly tender. While fear and loss and destruction sweep the world, we read about characters navigating troubled families, dealing with loss, falling in love, creating art, seeking connection. Something I found deeply fascinating about the book was its exploration of all the ways society might change if death on a massive scale became a long-term constant in everyone’s lives, particularly its inevitable entanglement with capitalist enterprise. There’s something inevitably bleak about these ideas (for example the eulogy hotel chains that allow the bereaved to efficiently, and for the right price luxuriously, say farewell to their loved one or the euthanasia theme park aimed at giving doomed children one last wonderful day) but what stops the book tumbling into abstract dystopia or a gruelling grimfest is the way each story unerringly finds its human centre. It’s a frankly incredible accomplishment in terms of narrative precision, thematic control and sharp, economical characterwork.
How High We Go In The Dark is an intense and powerful read that finds beauty amidst horror, compassion amongst destruction, hope in the depths of despair, and humanity, always, in everything. I kind of felt like I was getting my heart turned inside out for much of the experience but this book left me dazzled and moved, and perhaps even a little bit changed.
September 22, 2022
A book filled with wonder on possibilities but with a lack of execution to go with the daring and ideas of the author
I don’t regret finding love and always thinking of possibilities
How High We Go in the Dark is a very readable novel with grand ideas, but I felt it paled in execution compared to the works of David Mitchell (having recently read his debut Ghostwritten) and similarly bold Love and Other Thought Experiments from Sophie Ward.
There is however, I want to emphasise, a lot to enjoy. From the melting tundra of Siberia where we start of the book, to a macabre theme park, to a mysterious afterlife and a science facility cloning genetically modified pigs, Sequoia Nagamatsu is ambitious. Any of those four first chapters could have been a book, with the second one being especially enjoyable.
City of Laughter feels like Never Let Me Go condensed, with an euthanasia theme park and loss pervading the chapter, told by a rather unemotive, observant character.
There is also a mysterious tattoo recurring *Cloud Atlas vibes intensifying*, so the conceptual direction of the book was definitely something I could appreciate. However, the variety/brevity and the recognizability are also exactly two of the three main weaknesses of the book.
Were all narratives needed and unique enough to tell the story?
I often thought someone was a man and the character talking ended up being a woman of a wildly different age than I imagined. Also, we end in 2080’s and the society, besides some different funeral rituals, is hardly any different than our current day and age, despite a pandemic killing many, many millions.
Generic (sci-fi) as a moniker comes to mind at times as well. It's almost a bingo card of hot topics to pack in a 300 page book, with pandemics, discrimination of different people, climate change melting tundra’s, thus leading to viruses being released, bitcoins, genetic manipulation of pigs, robot dogs and mass commercialization of death, self-driving cars and fanatic evangelicals, cryosleep and VR. Many of those topics have been done before, and have been done better. Heck, one of the chapters had me thinking: "This is very Interstellar", with a singularity and a mysterious planet system from story 1 returning. Pig son is another example, in story it is similar to Oryx and Crake, with pigs bred for human organ transplantation. Still, telling an intelligent pig about the The Lord of the Rings is a feat: how do you do that and make it believable and even a little bit touching? Nagamatsu does it quite skillfully.
Then we have Kumbaya in space, with a crew deciding not to take over a habitable world due to concerns for native wildlife. It is almost a polar opposite of the bleakness Liu Cixin imagines humans venturing in space will act like in The Dark Forest. With sentences like: Maybe it won’t be so bad if we do it together it's almost too sweet in my view to be deemed realistic.
Loss of loved ones, parent-child conflict, romance and consolation of other planets are recurring topics; sentimentality is something lurking that the extreme situations does kind of bring with it.
The Asian-American experience angle is interesting and well executed, with kids ashamed of a creative paths and failed careers, instead of being a lawyer or a scientist.
How the world and me can be better comes back as a thought at the end of the book, and this is a hopeful, maybe even a too hopeful, book.
I greatly enjoyed the themes and ideas, but more focus and diversity in narrative voice would have helped me appreciate this book as I imagined I would like it upfront. 3.5 stars rounded down.
I don’t regret finding love and always thinking of possibilities
How High We Go in the Dark is a very readable novel with grand ideas, but I felt it paled in execution compared to the works of David Mitchell (having recently read his debut Ghostwritten) and similarly bold Love and Other Thought Experiments from Sophie Ward.
There is however, I want to emphasise, a lot to enjoy. From the melting tundra of Siberia where we start of the book, to a macabre theme park, to a mysterious afterlife and a science facility cloning genetically modified pigs, Sequoia Nagamatsu is ambitious. Any of those four first chapters could have been a book, with the second one being especially enjoyable.
City of Laughter feels like Never Let Me Go condensed, with an euthanasia theme park and loss pervading the chapter, told by a rather unemotive, observant character.
There is also a mysterious tattoo recurring *Cloud Atlas vibes intensifying*, so the conceptual direction of the book was definitely something I could appreciate. However, the variety/brevity and the recognizability are also exactly two of the three main weaknesses of the book.
Were all narratives needed and unique enough to tell the story?
I often thought someone was a man and the character talking ended up being a woman of a wildly different age than I imagined. Also, we end in 2080’s and the society, besides some different funeral rituals, is hardly any different than our current day and age, despite a pandemic killing many, many millions.
Generic (sci-fi) as a moniker comes to mind at times as well. It's almost a bingo card of hot topics to pack in a 300 page book, with pandemics, discrimination of different people, climate change melting tundra’s, thus leading to viruses being released, bitcoins, genetic manipulation of pigs, robot dogs and mass commercialization of death, self-driving cars and fanatic evangelicals, cryosleep and VR. Many of those topics have been done before, and have been done better. Heck, one of the chapters had me thinking: "This is very Interstellar", with a singularity and a mysterious planet system from story 1 returning. Pig son is another example, in story it is similar to Oryx and Crake, with pigs bred for human organ transplantation. Still, telling an intelligent pig about the The Lord of the Rings is a feat: how do you do that and make it believable and even a little bit touching? Nagamatsu does it quite skillfully.
Then we have Kumbaya in space, with a crew deciding not to take over a habitable world due to concerns for native wildlife. It is almost a polar opposite of the bleakness Liu Cixin imagines humans venturing in space will act like in The Dark Forest. With sentences like: Maybe it won’t be so bad if we do it together it's almost too sweet in my view to be deemed realistic.
Loss of loved ones, parent-child conflict, romance and consolation of other planets are recurring topics; sentimentality is something lurking that the extreme situations does kind of bring with it.
The Asian-American experience angle is interesting and well executed, with kids ashamed of a creative paths and failed careers, instead of being a lawyer or a scientist.
How the world and me can be better comes back as a thought at the end of the book, and this is a hopeful, maybe even a too hopeful, book.
I greatly enjoyed the themes and ideas, but more focus and diversity in narrative voice would have helped me appreciate this book as I imagined I would like it upfront. 3.5 stars rounded down.
May 26, 2022
Lacklustre and monotonous, not only did How High We Go in the Dark fail to grip my attention but it also failed to elicit an emotional response on my part. It was a bland and repetitive affair, which is a pity given the hype around it. It didn’t help that a few weeks ago I read another ‘Cloud Atlas-esque’ novel. And while I didn’t fall head over heels in love with To Paradise, I cannot deny that Yanagihara’s prose is superb. Here instead…Sequoia Nagamatsu’s prose brings to mind the word turgid (examples: “Moles and freckles dance around your belly button like a Jackson Pollock painting, and I fight the urge to grab a marker and find a way to connect them into a Tibetan mandala, as if that would unlock some secret about who you were and what, if anything, I really meant to you.” and “your ass the shade of a stray plum spoiling behind a produce stand”).
Additionally, to compare this to the work of Emily St. John Mandel seems misleading, as How High We Go in the Dark lacks the atmosphere and subtlety that characterizes her books (and this is coming from someone who isn’t a devoted fan of hers). Anyway, even if I were to consider How High We Go in the Dark on its own merits, well, the verdict isn’t good. While this is by no means the worst novel I’ve read, it has been a while since I’ve been confronted with a novel that is so consistently and thoroughly mediocre. I will likely forget about ever having read this in a few days. Already I struggle to remember most of its stories (let alone its characters).
Even if I was tempted early on to DNF this, I kept on reading hoping that the next story/chapter would deliver something more substantial than its predecessor but no such thing happened. I guess I could say that it was ambitious? I mean, it doesn’t pull off what it’d set out to do but at least it had aimed high? Of course, as we know, if you aim too high you end up crashing down (a la Icarus).
Ugh, I’m really trying to think of some positives to say about How High We Go in the Dark but it seems that I have nothing good to say about it other than it has an ambitious premise (whether it actually delivers on its premise is up to debate...). I guess, I like the book cover...not sure if that counts as a 'positive'...
So, to give prospective readers an idea of what to expect: How High We Go in the Dark takes place during and after 2030. A lot of the population is decimated by the Arctic plague which is unleashed onto the world after some scientists ‘stumble’ upon the thirty-thousand-year-old remains of a girl. Additionally to the plague climate/environmental disasters are causing further chaos. Each chapter reads like a self-contained story. While some characters, we learn, are connected, or even related, to each other, these stories ultimately fail to come truly together. By the end, what we have isn’t a tapestry but a series of samey fragments that don’t really succeed in bringing to life the characters or relationships they are supposedly focused on. Out of 14 stories only 4 are centred on female characters. If the characters we are reading of are shown to be in romantic and or sexual relationships, these will be painfully heteronormative ones. It seems that Nagamatsu’s vision of the future has no place for the gays, let alone for those who do not identify with their assigned sex at birth. That we get so few female voices also pissed me off. Like, come on, 4 out of 14?
Anyhow, the first two stories actually held some promise. In the first one, we follow a scientist whose daughter, also a scientist, died while ‘unearthing’ of the thirty-thousand-year-old human remains. This father goes to Siberia to resume his daughter’s work. Here we hear the first echoes of the plague: after these remains are found the facility goes under quarantine. Like the majority of the stories in this novel, this first one is all about parents & their children. There is the dynamic between the narrator and his now-dead daughter as well as reflections on his daughter’s (non)parenting of his granddaughter.
The following one, 'City of Laughter', almost succeeds in being memorable but ends up falling similarly short. The central character is once again a bland and inoffensive man, just an average Joe who is only slightly interesting because of his job. This guy works at a euthanasia park. The plague initially affects children and those with vulnerable immune systems (i think? we never gain an entire picture of this plague so what do i know) so some governor proposes the construction of “an amusement park that could gently end children’s pain—roller coasters capable of lulling their passengers into unconsciousness before stopping their hearts”. The main guy falls in love with a woman who is there with her son. The juxtaposition between the amusement park setting and the true purpose of this 'park' does give this story an air of tragicomedy (at one point a distraught and grief-stricken parent hugs our protagonist who is wearing a furry animal costume).
The following stories are harder to set apart from each other. There is one with a scientist/lab-person who has lost his son to the plague. He ends up forming a father-son bond with a talking pig whose organs will be used to save/help those with the plague (once again, i don’t entirely remember because it wasn’t made very clear). You would think that the talking pig storyline would be far from boring but you’d be wrong. That this ‘son-figure’ is a pig is a mere gimmick. The pig could have been a monkey or a doll or a robot. I would have preferred for the pig to be more of a pig. This story has even the gall THE Pig movie (with the scientist telling the pig: 'that'll do'). Anyway, once again the author explores this, by now, rather tired parent-child dynamic: what does it mean to be a good parent? Do you protect your child from the harsh realities of their world? Maybe if he would have allowed for more subtlety in his storytelling and character interactions, maybe then I could have felt more connected to the parents and their children. But that wasn't the case. The conflict is made so obvious, that there is little room for interpretation or even nuance.
We have a couple of stories where boring men fall for boring women and vice-versa (here the writing veers into the overwrought). Some do so online, but the author doesn’t really add anything new or interesting to the VR experience. I mean, if anything, these VR-focused ones read like subpar Black Mirror episodes. Social media goes largely unmentioned...
We then have quite a few that go on about new funerary traditions because apparently so many people have died of the plague and cemeteries cannot contain so many bodies. Here Nagamatsu tries to be inventive but I found the idea of funeral hotels and funerary towers rather, eeh, underwhelming? Even that one chapter that follows a spaceship on its way to make a new Earth failed to be interesting. There are two chapters that try to subvert things: one is intentionally disorientating in that the narrator and some other people are someplace else, another one tries to tie things back to the 1st chapter, to give this novel an overarching story, but t it just came across as jarring.
I don’t understand why the author chose 2030 as his starting point. The future he envisions feels generic and wishy-washy. There are self-driving vehicles (i think?) planet earth is dying, and this plague is decimating the human race. How refreshing. Maybe I’ve read too much speculative fiction but the sci-fi & dystopian elements of How High We Go in the Dark felt tame, vanilla even. Been there, done that kind of thing. While Nagamatsu strives to achieve that quiet realism that characterizes the dystopian novels of authors such as Mandel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ling Ma, he misses the mark. Tone-wise too these stories seem lacking, especially if I were to compare them with the unsettling work of John Wyndham. In addition, the future he envisions pales in comparison to the ones you can find in the stories penned by N.K. Jemisin. Throughout my reading experience of How High We Go in the Dark I just kept being reminded of better speculative books & films.
Almost all of the narrators sounded exactly like the same dude. Which was odd given that these characters are meant to be at different stages of their lives. Additionally, it seemed sus that all of the characters used the same vocabulary, articulated themselves in identical ways, and they all shared a love for ‘vintage’ music (we have the Beatles, Patti Smith, The Strokes, Smashing Pumpkin, Siouxsie and the Banshees). The story is set in 2030. The characters are in their 20s, 30s, possibly early 40s. Yet, they all came across as belonging to the same generation. While I know that the whole idea of there being different generations is somewhat reductive, you can admit that people who are born in the same time ‘periods’ and in the same countries (the majority of the characters are Japanese American and live in America) share certain experiences/similarities. Here, none of the characters came across as believable older millennials or gen-zers. The popular media that is mentioned too was ‘old’. Why not then set your Artic Plague during the 90s or early 2000s something? It would have been made for a far more convincing setting. At least then the characters (from their worldview to their vernacular) would have not felt so out-of-place (come on, these guys do not sound like they are born in the 2000s).
The parent-child conflict that was at the heart of so many of these stories was cheesy af. We have a parent trying to connect to their child. The child is like, NERD. Okay, I’m joking but still, you get the gist. The children are grieving and confused, the parents are grieving and confused. Yet, what could have been a touching book about human connection reads like a parody, starring difficult children who wear headphones 24/7 and answer back because of teenage angst, and emotionally repressed parents who happen to be scientists and because of this, they are cold and clinical. On that note, there is one character who is not a scientist and is in fact 'an artist' and her art was beyond ridiculous (it gave me the impression that the person who had created said character had only a vague and clichéd idea of the kind of person that goes on to become a painter).
This book is full of grieving people, which should elicit some sort of reaction from me but nada. Nothing. My uncle and grandfather died respectively in November and December. I was unable to attend one of the funerals due to travel restrictions. The other died soon after testing positive for covid. Surely a book about losing your loved ones to a pandemic should hit close to home....except that it didn't. I felt at a remove from the characters who were often defined by their job and or whether they had children.
The world-building, as mentioned above, was full of lacunae. Some of the gaps in the world-building seemed intentional as if to provide us with too much information on the plague and the state of the world during and after it would take away from the ‘human’ relationships and the existential quandaries experienced by the characters….but still, I could not envision this future nor could I bring myself to believe in it. One of the stories seems to suggest a lack of resources but later on, this doesn't seem the case. I also found it hard to believe that the relatives of those who could easily be seen as culpable of this whole plague (the wife and granddaughter of that first scientist) would be allowed to go off to Earth 2.0 (as far as i can recall of course, maybe the narrative does address this...).
Choppy and repetitive, How High We Go in the Dark is a rather subpar novel. I would have almost preferred it if had just been your bog-standard speculative fiction book but no, this one aims higher and it shows (not in a good way). The dystopian elements are gimmicky and given our current pandemic…derivative (apparently the author wrote this before covid but i am reading it now so..).
The writing vacillated from decent to unintentionally hilarious to plain bad ("Aki still avoided speaking to me when he could avoid it."...this book had an editor? really?!). We get a few clumsy attempts at the 2nd person which were...the less said about them the better actually. Nagamatsu's prose was not my cup of tea.
This was not the genre-bending novel I was hoping for. The supposedly interwoven storylines did not feel particularly 'interwoven'. There are characters who are mentioned in more than one chapter, or we read of someone who is close to a character we previously encountered but that’s about it. These chapters and characters failed to come together in any meaningful way.
Anyway, just because I thought this was an exceedingly bland affair does not mean in any way that you will feel the same way. If you loved this, I am happy for you. At least one of us was able to enjoy this book.
If you are interested in this novel I recommend you check out more positive reviews.
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July 13, 2023
There's something so compelling about the writing of this book.
This (almost?) short story collection makes for a unique post apocalyptic book.
Totally recommend!
This (almost?) short story collection makes for a unique post apocalyptic book.
Totally recommend!
December 16, 2021
This is a fucking heavy book. Desolate and sad, but also ambitious and lightly insane. Talking pigs, roller coaster euthanasia machines for children, generational trauma. I suspect this will be a book that gets a lot of attention and it should, but read it in a good frame of mind because it can be quite bleak.
December 22, 2022
i was so dazed by this book i forgot to write anything about it.
i'm still kind of at a loss.
i was once sent a marketing banner claiming the pictured book to be a mix of severance and station eleven by a fellow enthusiast of both. that sounded like the exact type of PR jargon that's classically too good to be true, but if it was this book it was talking about (and i don't know that it was!) i have to agree. i don't know if this is that book, but it lives up to it.
a book being a mix of two five stars...pretty high praise!!
the MULTITUDINOUS perspectives at some points detracted - i don't always have time to connect to all these newbies! - but this book still managed to hurt my feelings and make me want to cry.
i didn't, though.
don't get it twisted. i'm still cool and edgy and unfeeling. like the book-reviewer equivalent of the leader of a biker gang.
bottom line: do i...LIKE literary sci-fi?
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currently-reading updates
this is for the cover. i can't even pretend
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reading books by asian authors for aapi month!
book 1: kim jiyoung, born 1982
book 2: siren queen
book 3: the heart principle
book 4: n.p.
book 5: the hole
book 6: set on you
book 7: disorientation
book 8: parade
book 9: if i had your face
book 10: joan is okay
book 11: strange weather in tokyo
book 12: sarong party girls
book 13: the wind-up bird chronicle
book 14: portrait of a thief
book 15: sophie go's lonely hearts club
book 16: chemistry
book 17: heaven
book 18: the atlas six
book 19: the remains of the day
book 20: is everyone hanging out without me? and other concerns
book 21: why not me?
book 22: when the tiger came down the mountain
book 23: the lies we tell
book 24: to paradise
book 25: pachinko
book 26: you are eating an orange. you are naked.
book 27: cursed bunny
book 28: almond
book 29: a tiny upward shove
book 30: ms ice sandwich
book 31: the woman in the library
book 32: nothing like i imagined
book 33: night sky with exit wounds
book 34: all the lovers in the night
book 35: the white book
book 36: the woman in the purple skirt
book 37: the very secret society of irregular witches
book 38: how high we go in the dark
i'm still kind of at a loss.
i was once sent a marketing banner claiming the pictured book to be a mix of severance and station eleven by a fellow enthusiast of both. that sounded like the exact type of PR jargon that's classically too good to be true, but if it was this book it was talking about (and i don't know that it was!) i have to agree. i don't know if this is that book, but it lives up to it.
a book being a mix of two five stars...pretty high praise!!
the MULTITUDINOUS perspectives at some points detracted - i don't always have time to connect to all these newbies! - but this book still managed to hurt my feelings and make me want to cry.
i didn't, though.
don't get it twisted. i'm still cool and edgy and unfeeling. like the book-reviewer equivalent of the leader of a biker gang.
bottom line: do i...LIKE literary sci-fi?
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currently-reading updates
this is for the cover. i can't even pretend
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reading books by asian authors for aapi month!
book 1: kim jiyoung, born 1982
book 2: siren queen
book 3: the heart principle
book 4: n.p.
book 5: the hole
book 6: set on you
book 7: disorientation
book 8: parade
book 9: if i had your face
book 10: joan is okay
book 11: strange weather in tokyo
book 12: sarong party girls
book 13: the wind-up bird chronicle
book 14: portrait of a thief
book 15: sophie go's lonely hearts club
book 16: chemistry
book 17: heaven
book 18: the atlas six
book 19: the remains of the day
book 20: is everyone hanging out without me? and other concerns
book 21: why not me?
book 22: when the tiger came down the mountain
book 23: the lies we tell
book 24: to paradise
book 25: pachinko
book 26: you are eating an orange. you are naked.
book 27: cursed bunny
book 28: almond
book 29: a tiny upward shove
book 30: ms ice sandwich
book 31: the woman in the library
book 32: nothing like i imagined
book 33: night sky with exit wounds
book 34: all the lovers in the night
book 35: the white book
book 36: the woman in the purple skirt
book 37: the very secret society of irregular witches
book 38: how high we go in the dark
February 20, 2023
I have never enjoyed a short story collection until now. And I didn't just enjoy it. I ADORED it.
I talked everyone's ear off about this for a week while reading it. I begged other's to read it. As I'm begging you to read it. It's truly phenomenal.
Was I absolutely obsessed with every single story? No. But I enjoyed all of them. That's never happened before. Some of them I might give 3.5. But nothing was below a 3 and so many were 5 stars that this has to get a 5 from me.
My favorite, I think, is 'Scope of Possibility'. What a damn RIDE. It had me reeling.
I need more of this. Whatever genre this is, I'm begging for it.
I talked everyone's ear off about this for a week while reading it. I begged other's to read it. As I'm begging you to read it. It's truly phenomenal.
Was I absolutely obsessed with every single story? No. But I enjoyed all of them. That's never happened before. Some of them I might give 3.5. But nothing was below a 3 and so many were 5 stars that this has to get a 5 from me.
My favorite, I think, is 'Scope of Possibility'. What a damn RIDE. It had me reeling.
I need more of this. Whatever genre this is, I'm begging for it.
October 6, 2021
This is an unbelievably compassionate book and such a talented piece of work that I can't even describe why. It creates such a mental image in your head with all these interconnected events and time periods that I felt desperate to seek "what ifs" throughout. It will dive deep into your heart with the centuries of families affected, a lot of death, but yet a lot of love and most of all the reconstruction after it all. ❤️
As we are experiencing the 2nd wave of this pandemic, this book clicked with so many correlations. The story begins in 2030, after a plague is unleashed into the world while uncovering a virus infected girl frozen in an ancient burial ground. How clever we are to dive into every virus that ever lived on this earth either by burial or human waste and not think we will refester it.😳
The day to day living through a pandemic is stamped throughout the book with our dilemmas and inconveniences, but yet it doesn't overwhelm you... it needed to drive it home...I mean really drive it home that we could be living with it for centuries. Why are some families affected and some unscathed was the bigger question and how will generations resume after it?
While listening to the audio, you hear the desperate plea of a mother to keep her terminally ill son comfortable, the End of Life Theme Park where people take their loved ones to an Euthanasia rollercoaster, Galactic homes to carry the survivors to a new life, VR Cafes, Elegy Hotels to bid final farewells and avatars to recreate our loved ones to converse with.
Please read the other descriptions of this book before you pass it by for another Covid rendition...it is so much more than that. *Alexis, Wow!!! Your review!!!"
Thank you NetGalley and Harper Audio for this unbelievable ARC in exchange for my review.
As we are experiencing the 2nd wave of this pandemic, this book clicked with so many correlations. The story begins in 2030, after a plague is unleashed into the world while uncovering a virus infected girl frozen in an ancient burial ground. How clever we are to dive into every virus that ever lived on this earth either by burial or human waste and not think we will refester it.😳
The day to day living through a pandemic is stamped throughout the book with our dilemmas and inconveniences, but yet it doesn't overwhelm you... it needed to drive it home...I mean really drive it home that we could be living with it for centuries. Why are some families affected and some unscathed was the bigger question and how will generations resume after it?
While listening to the audio, you hear the desperate plea of a mother to keep her terminally ill son comfortable, the End of Life Theme Park where people take their loved ones to an Euthanasia rollercoaster, Galactic homes to carry the survivors to a new life, VR Cafes, Elegy Hotels to bid final farewells and avatars to recreate our loved ones to converse with.
Please read the other descriptions of this book before you pass it by for another Covid rendition...it is so much more than that. *Alexis, Wow!!! Your review!!!"
Thank you NetGalley and Harper Audio for this unbelievable ARC in exchange for my review.
March 4, 2022
There's a sentence in this book that begins, "In the real world, people comfort themselves with ignorance, politics, and faith". We book lovers would add words and stories to that list... and I, who am still in the throes of my current game addiction, would add RPGs.
Long before Covid-19, inflation, and an insane Putin trying his best to start WWIII, people had the need and inclination to escape reality. We humans have probably been telling stories since around the time we were able to utter more than a few distinguishing grunts.
Storytelling appears to be innate in humans, an instinct to stretch beyond our meager lives and into something more adventurous, happier, higher.
"How High We Go in the Dark" takes us away from the current pandemic and fast forwards a few years to 2030 when scientists discover a 30,000 year old settlement in the melting permafrost of Siberia.
Unfortunately, these ancient people were suffering from a virus at the time of their demise, a virus formerly unknown to science and that remained viable and highly contagious once it thawed. This virus makes Covid-19 attractive in comparison.
The story is told from the point of view of many different people, over a long period of time. No character had a repeating chapter and it was like reading a book of short stories revolving around a central theme.
I dislike short stories and was going to just DNF the book when I realised that's what it was. I'm not sure why I kept reading because, with the exception of Miki in "A Gallery a Century, a Cry a Millenium", I felt no attachment to the characters after the first couple. I kinda wished the virus was deadlier and killed off the whole lot of them so the book would end.
However, for whatever reason, I trudged on. Maybe because I'm reading just a small amount a day lately, living in my game instead of books, I was able to stick with it. And ya know what? I'm glad I did.
The final chapter made it all worth it. Wow..... It had me setting aside the controller and clinging to my Kindle, needing to continue reading. It might have broken my love affair with my current game and plopped me right back into book addiction had that chapter continued.
I'm reeling.
I will say too that the author writes wonderfully, descriptively, and imaginatively. I think if the story had been told from the POV of only a couple characters, I would be giving this five stars.
Those of you who enjoy short stories and speculative fiction will likely appreciate this book. It's a story that's been told before and one that will be told again. Yet it's unique enough to make it seem like an entirely original story.
How High We Go in the Dark shows how it's not just storytelling that is innate in humans, but also perseverance and the ability to thrive no matter what is thrown our way.
When times are bleak, we somehow find a way to push on, to go higher, and to hopefully soar into a brighter, better, safer future for all.
Long before Covid-19, inflation, and an insane Putin trying his best to start WWIII, people had the need and inclination to escape reality. We humans have probably been telling stories since around the time we were able to utter more than a few distinguishing grunts.
Storytelling appears to be innate in humans, an instinct to stretch beyond our meager lives and into something more adventurous, happier, higher.
"How High We Go in the Dark" takes us away from the current pandemic and fast forwards a few years to 2030 when scientists discover a 30,000 year old settlement in the melting permafrost of Siberia.
Unfortunately, these ancient people were suffering from a virus at the time of their demise, a virus formerly unknown to science and that remained viable and highly contagious once it thawed. This virus makes Covid-19 attractive in comparison.
The story is told from the point of view of many different people, over a long period of time. No character had a repeating chapter and it was like reading a book of short stories revolving around a central theme.
I dislike short stories and was going to just DNF the book when I realised that's what it was. I'm not sure why I kept reading because, with the exception of Miki in "A Gallery a Century, a Cry a Millenium", I felt no attachment to the characters after the first couple. I kinda wished the virus was deadlier and killed off the whole lot of them so the book would end.
However, for whatever reason, I trudged on. Maybe because I'm reading just a small amount a day lately, living in my game instead of books, I was able to stick with it. And ya know what? I'm glad I did.
The final chapter made it all worth it. Wow..... It had me setting aside the controller and clinging to my Kindle, needing to continue reading. It might have broken my love affair with my current game and plopped me right back into book addiction had that chapter continued.
I'm reeling.
I will say too that the author writes wonderfully, descriptively, and imaginatively. I think if the story had been told from the POV of only a couple characters, I would be giving this five stars.
Those of you who enjoy short stories and speculative fiction will likely appreciate this book. It's a story that's been told before and one that will be told again. Yet it's unique enough to make it seem like an entirely original story.
How High We Go in the Dark shows how it's not just storytelling that is innate in humans, but also perseverance and the ability to thrive no matter what is thrown our way.
When times are bleak, we somehow find a way to push on, to go higher, and to hopefully soar into a brighter, better, safer future for all.
July 9, 2022
“How High We Go In the Dark” is a collection of stories exploring humanity’s response to catastrophic climate change resulting in the unleashing of cataclysmic contagion devastating human existence. These are dark and fascinating stories in which author Sequoia Nagamatsu creates a future earth that gives the reader pause.
Climate change is a popular subject amongst authors of late. Audible created a short story collection: “Warmer Collection” in which Audible asked today’s most thought-provoking authors to envision a conceivable tomorrow from out-of-control climate change. Nagamatsu added a deadly virus to add to humanity’s problem of the earth’s degradation due to man’s earthly lack of respect.
The first story sets the stage with the Batagaika crater in Russia’s Siberia. I needed to research this crater and found that scientist believe that the sediment layers of the crater could reveal up to 200,000 years of earth history and therefore it is believed that it offers many clues about climate change. It started off as a small gully in the 1960s, and remote sensing observations have found that it’s growing approximately 20-30 meters per year because of ongoing thawing: read climate change. I read to learn, and I have never heard of this crater and all that it implies.
I digress. In the first story, a young female Neanderthal corpse is found at the crater site. How she got there, with Mediterranean shells sprinkled around her is a scientific mystery. The corpse unfortunately possessed an unknown deadly virus. Nagamatsu started writing these stories in 2011, long before the Covid pandemic. His fictional virus is one that causes cells in the body to change form. For example, your brain cells could become a mass of liver cells, or your heart cells could change into a gall bladder. It’s a creepy thought.
From there, his stories are about mankind and the response to the virus and to climate change. Southern Florida disappears below the Atlantic Ocean. Most of NYC is underwater. Japan becomes a floating city.
Because of the virus, commerce changes to support the dead and dying. A euthanasia amusement park is built helping young virus victims end their lives happily. Because the body organs are shape-changing, the scientific community works on creating artificial organs that can be transplanted. Of course, pigs are used as host organs. There is a creepy story which resulted in a pig like Wilber in “Charlotte’s Web”.
Humanity must deal with all the infected corpses. Funerary Skyscrapers are built to house the dead. Some want to be ecological and have chosen to be part of a group urn upon cremation.
For those Scifi fans, he includes chapters of those brave souls who go into space in the attempt to find a hospitable planet for mankind. His novel is ambitious, covering decades and millenniums.
In each story you feel the isolation, the helplessness. Covid was a drop in the ocean compared to Nagamatsu’s virus. He explores many different ways in which survivors deal with the grief…most really disturbing. One story was about robotic pets that speak in the voice of the dead. Would you want a dog robot who had your loved-one’s voice and talked to you? His ideas of how commerce would change and how we would change when faced with devastation is very thought-provoking.
This was a difficult read for me. I was mesmerized and grossed-out (in equal measure) by his creativity. Although it’s a less than 300 page novel, it took me a long time to read. There’s much to contemplate. Plus, it’s a bit of a downer. Yet, I recommend it. This has staying power. This leaves you troubled in the most provocative way. If this doesn’t motivate you to treat our earth better, nothing will.
Climate change is a popular subject amongst authors of late. Audible created a short story collection: “Warmer Collection” in which Audible asked today’s most thought-provoking authors to envision a conceivable tomorrow from out-of-control climate change. Nagamatsu added a deadly virus to add to humanity’s problem of the earth’s degradation due to man’s earthly lack of respect.
The first story sets the stage with the Batagaika crater in Russia’s Siberia. I needed to research this crater and found that scientist believe that the sediment layers of the crater could reveal up to 200,000 years of earth history and therefore it is believed that it offers many clues about climate change. It started off as a small gully in the 1960s, and remote sensing observations have found that it’s growing approximately 20-30 meters per year because of ongoing thawing: read climate change. I read to learn, and I have never heard of this crater and all that it implies.
I digress. In the first story, a young female Neanderthal corpse is found at the crater site. How she got there, with Mediterranean shells sprinkled around her is a scientific mystery. The corpse unfortunately possessed an unknown deadly virus. Nagamatsu started writing these stories in 2011, long before the Covid pandemic. His fictional virus is one that causes cells in the body to change form. For example, your brain cells could become a mass of liver cells, or your heart cells could change into a gall bladder. It’s a creepy thought.
From there, his stories are about mankind and the response to the virus and to climate change. Southern Florida disappears below the Atlantic Ocean. Most of NYC is underwater. Japan becomes a floating city.
Because of the virus, commerce changes to support the dead and dying. A euthanasia amusement park is built helping young virus victims end their lives happily. Because the body organs are shape-changing, the scientific community works on creating artificial organs that can be transplanted. Of course, pigs are used as host organs. There is a creepy story which resulted in a pig like Wilber in “Charlotte’s Web”.
Humanity must deal with all the infected corpses. Funerary Skyscrapers are built to house the dead. Some want to be ecological and have chosen to be part of a group urn upon cremation.
For those Scifi fans, he includes chapters of those brave souls who go into space in the attempt to find a hospitable planet for mankind. His novel is ambitious, covering decades and millenniums.
In each story you feel the isolation, the helplessness. Covid was a drop in the ocean compared to Nagamatsu’s virus. He explores many different ways in which survivors deal with the grief…most really disturbing. One story was about robotic pets that speak in the voice of the dead. Would you want a dog robot who had your loved-one’s voice and talked to you? His ideas of how commerce would change and how we would change when faced with devastation is very thought-provoking.
This was a difficult read for me. I was mesmerized and grossed-out (in equal measure) by his creativity. Although it’s a less than 300 page novel, it took me a long time to read. There’s much to contemplate. Plus, it’s a bit of a downer. Yet, I recommend it. This has staying power. This leaves you troubled in the most provocative way. If this doesn’t motivate you to treat our earth better, nothing will.
December 9, 2022
“It’s strange how the discovery of an ancient girl in Siberia and viruses we’ve never encountered before can both redefine what we know about being human and at the same time threaten our humanity”
This is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel and I think will be a much talked about novel in 2022.
Ostensibly it is a part speculative fiction/part science fiction/part future dystopian novel, written in the form of a series of separate but interlinked stories – dealing with a global plague in the near future and its consequence over future decades but later roaming over space and time.
The book on that level has clear shades of both David Mitchell (even more so given large parts of the book are set in Japan like Mitchell’s early novels) and Emily St John Mandel (not least as this shares a UK editor, if not publisher, with Station Eleven) with shades of Margaret Atwood and even Dr Who.
But really this is a very distinctive book about death and grief – and this makes for a book which is both very difficult to read (every story has the loss of a child, parent or grandparent integral to it which can lead to an accumulation of bleakness which I think some readers may struggle with in our pandemic times) but also with a more hopeful (even at times sentimental) undercurrent.
The author’s only previous publication was a more conventional (in form but not content) short story collection “Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone”. In a fascinating interview on that book he was, interestingly asked about a recurring theme of loss and grief and was asked about a Joyce Carol Oates quote that “Grief is the most humane of emotions but it is a one-sided emotion: it is not reciprocated.” leading to him commenting at some length on grieving (perhaps showing how close it was to his mind already)
I think the one-sidedness of grief is what allows people, our characters to shape that emotion into distinct experience. The grief isn’t just a product of something that happened to the character but it becomes the character and informs how a character moves through a story.. ….. A grieving character may run away, confront the loss, imagine another life, pour themselves into work, or maybe find solace in someone who is also grieving. One-sided? Sure. If we consider one-sided as allowing those that have suffered a loss to use their grief to create dialogues with aspects of themselves and the dead. And I think whether or not those shadows reciprocate (and coming to terms with some answer) is part of process of healing (and often the end of a story) ….. But to what extent is order and foresight at play during the grieving process? I can’t blame my characters for their trajectories in the same way that I can’t blame myself for a story not arriving at the destination that I had in mind. So, I think it’s more of a collection of pathways of grief with each path being just as worthy as the other. There are no right or wrong ways to deal with a loss. The addition of magic just makes certain pathways that would otherwise go unnoticed more distinct and visible
In terms of this novel – the author explained in a Bookseller interview that the novel’s origins go back 10 years (before the short story collection) when he was living in Japan and dealing with the death of his grandfather, a death (due to living apart from his family in the US) he was unaware of until months after it happened – leaving him with guilt about not saying goodbye. He then in turn became interested in the implication of an ageing population in a city with no space for new cemeteries or temples : “There are funeral skyscrapers in Tokyo and mortuary expos which offer families the chance to share an urn, for example. All these alternative funerary practices naturally entered my writing because I have always been interested in loss and grief and how differently people react to it. I always thought that was a very dynamic way of looking into the human condition.”
So death and grief and the different pathways to grieving are a crucial part of his art and writing – and the idea of a global plague which makes fundamental changes to global mortality, changes and a sense of loss and grief exacerbated by climate change, gives him plenty of scope to explore this topic while working in other influences such as Carl Sagan, Star Trek, (probably too much) late 20th Century pop music, Japanese folklore and even a reaction to Trump and the anti-Asian backlash which followed from his “China Virus” jibes, wanting instead to show Asian-Americans “just living their lives, as well as being victims of the pandemic themselves”.
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“30,000 Years Beneath a Eulogy” starts the story and gives the crucial background to the plague. It is written by an academic – Cliff Mirayisho visiting a research centre at the Batagaika crater in Siberia, shortly after the tragic death of his daughter Clara (a climate change activist and researcher who put her work ahead of her daughter Yumi – who lives with Cliff and his artist wife Miki). The crystal pendant wearing Clara had discovered the remains of a 30,000 young part Neanderthal slightly tatooed girl “Annie” in what seems to be some kind of sophisticated memorial. The body was uncovered by the rapidly thawing permafrost, the thawing acting as both a sign of and a multiplier for climate change but also causing another danger as the girl seems to have died of a hiterhto unknown virus which infects the researchers
“City of Laughter” is set a few years later and is perhaps one of the saddest of the stories. The virus has become the so-called Arctic Plague, which has high mortality among children and seems to function by reprogramming organ cells to act like other organs. The first party protagonist Skip has taken a job at a theme park adapted as a “euthanasia park” – which gives dying children a last few quality days of life before they are euthanised on the park’s main ride (Osiris). The park is extended to accept a group of children undergoing a drug trial and Skip though forms an attachment to one of the children Fitch and his mother Dorrie (an ex-artist now working in the checkout facilities – giving parent’s their children’s ashes – and who is separated from her Firth’s father who is trying to develop new organs for Fitch).
“Through the Garden of Memory” is perhaps the hardest to parse of the stories. The narrator Jun is in a coma in hospital with the virus when he suddenly finds himself in what seems to be some form of shared dream or afterlife or alternative lifes (the idea of second chances is a key motif in the novel) – in some form of dark pit which is then filled with orbs of light containing glimpses both of other lives and the past lives of those in the pit (all of whom were dying plague victims). This story also gives the novel its title as Jun finding a baby persuades his fellows to form a human pyramid which he can climb to try and get the baby up to the seeming source of the lights.
“Pig Son” was for me the weakest of the short stories – mixing Ishiguro with Babe (or for me with M&S Percy Pig). It is narrated by Fitch’s father who is still continuing his research (which failed to save fitch) to grow human organs in pigs – when one of the pigs “Snortorious” suddenly develops human consciousness and speech .eventually realising (hence the Ishiguro links) the purpose for which he is being bred but not after a rather excrutiating part when he realises that humans eat pigs.
“Elegy Hotel” is one of a number of stories which explore, with Atwood-esque naming, how capitalism quickly adapts to profit from death and grief – here with a hotel which allows people to spend time with their loved ones dead bodies. Dennis is a worker in the hotel and befriends another worker Val, but to her despair refuses to repair a breach with his brilliant scientist brother Bryan which leads to Den not being around for the death of either of his parents.
“Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You” is another rather twee tale – a widower and now single parent has a reputation for repairing robo-dogs which people are increasingly using to preseve the memories of their loved ones (by getting them to programme the dogs for speech and actions before they pass) but increasingly finds the pets (including one he and his son have to remember his wife) are beyond repair.
“Songs of Your Decay” is about a female forensic scientist Aubrey whose work is now focused on watching the decay of the bodies of virus victims who give their bodies to science – she falls for one dying victim Laird and prefers listening to 80-90s music with him to spending time with her Doctor husband Tatsu.
“Life Around The Event Horizon” is where the book veers into Dr Who territory – the narrator is actually Dennis’s brother Bryan – who with the help of his post doc assistant (now second wife) Theresa (who corrected a crucial error in his calculations) seems to have discovered the black-hole based key to intergalatical travel via a singularity in his head!
“A Gallery A Century, A Cry A Millennium” is about the launch of a subsequent starship which goes in search of other planets – the crew (the adults of who are wakened from cryogenic suspension when the ship approaches a feasible system) include Miki, Yumi, Dorrie, Val and Bryan’s son. At one stage they find a deserted system-less rogue planet which seems as “old as the universe” and is covered with sophisticated ruins. Each time they wake time on earth has advanced tens if not hundreds of years (including finding a cure for the plague).
“The Used-To-Be-Party” is a short story of one of a number of people woken from comas/suspension post a cure but now finding themselves largely bereft of their loved ones – the narrator decides to organise a neighbourhood get-together for those like him.
“Melancholy Nights In a Tokyo Virtual Café” is told in the third person and is set in a future Japan ripe with post-plague unemployment. Akira finds himself drawn to a neighbour but only via a VR app – and then in rather odd circumstances encounters her estranged father in real life.
“Before You Melt Into The Sea” is a short but striking story of mourning rituals – where the narrator specialises in making and launching on the sea ice sculptures of the liquified remains of victims.
“Grave Friends” has some autobiographical elements – it is about an American based Japanese girl who returns to her family (who seem part of some shared burial urn society cum cult) after the death of her grandmother (who seems to be the child of the third story)
“The Scope of Possibility” returns us firmly to Dr Who territory and rather cleverly ties the full story together (including explaining both recurrent motifs and some, if not all,, of the oddities and anomalies in other stories) while crucially showing this unique and striking book’s key message - that loss and grief is simultaneously timeless and universal – and yet immediate and personal.
My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley
January 23, 2023
Now Nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel 2023
Nagamatsu gives us a pandemic novel told in interconnected stories, and the first few chapters utterly destroyed me: We learn how in a a world ravaged by climate change, an ancient virus gets unleashed from the melting permafrost in the Arctic and starts to haunt humanity for generations. People are trying to adapt and to survive - and that's the basis for all stories we hear, told by very different people (most of them having partly Japanese heritage) aiming to navigate the reality of mass death, fear, and grieving.
One of the most effective stories introduces a comedian who takes on a job in an amusement park built to offer dying plague victims assisted suicide by letting them ride a rollercoaster designed to numb and then kill them - we mostly meet parents planning to give their children a humane death (and those kids certainly can't consent and mostly aren't informed), and the whole scenario evokes the death ramps in concentration camps. The second story that really got me is about a scientist who, in a Never Let Me Go-like scenario, grows organs to transplant them into infected patients in order to prolong their lives - now granted, he grows them in pigs, not humans, but due to the manipulation of the gene pool, one pig develops speech, and a heart-wrenching scenario unfolds. In other stories, we meet healthcare workers and plague victims, people of different classes, geners, age groups, all of them with intricate inner worlds that are presented in empathic psychological writing.
In the second half, the book looses steam, and I also have to admit that the sci-fi ending lessens the overall effect of a book that, IMHO, screams to be read in the context of our current situation. But many of the stories, especially in the first half, are written with great clarity and nuance, always hitting the difficult notes. When Nagamatsu's storytelling shines, it's truly affecting, innovative and absorbing, as he writes about the human flaws that we know are currently destroying our planet - and while humans are trying to survive, they often choose the most ruthless paths to do so, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
It's also impressive that Nagamatsu manages to present his story collection as a coherent work of fiction, with some recurring characters and a narrative focus on the evolving world of the pandemic. The whole set-up suggests that this should read as a disparate work, but magically, it doesn't. A very interesting effort, let's see whether it gets nominated for some awards.
Nagamatsu gives us a pandemic novel told in interconnected stories, and the first few chapters utterly destroyed me: We learn how in a a world ravaged by climate change, an ancient virus gets unleashed from the melting permafrost in the Arctic and starts to haunt humanity for generations. People are trying to adapt and to survive - and that's the basis for all stories we hear, told by very different people (most of them having partly Japanese heritage) aiming to navigate the reality of mass death, fear, and grieving.
One of the most effective stories introduces a comedian who takes on a job in an amusement park built to offer dying plague victims assisted suicide by letting them ride a rollercoaster designed to numb and then kill them - we mostly meet parents planning to give their children a humane death (and those kids certainly can't consent and mostly aren't informed), and the whole scenario evokes the death ramps in concentration camps. The second story that really got me is about a scientist who, in a Never Let Me Go-like scenario, grows organs to transplant them into infected patients in order to prolong their lives - now granted, he grows them in pigs, not humans, but due to the manipulation of the gene pool, one pig develops speech, and a heart-wrenching scenario unfolds. In other stories, we meet healthcare workers and plague victims, people of different classes, geners, age groups, all of them with intricate inner worlds that are presented in empathic psychological writing.
In the second half, the book looses steam, and I also have to admit that the sci-fi ending lessens the overall effect of a book that, IMHO, screams to be read in the context of our current situation. But many of the stories, especially in the first half, are written with great clarity and nuance, always hitting the difficult notes. When Nagamatsu's storytelling shines, it's truly affecting, innovative and absorbing, as he writes about the human flaws that we know are currently destroying our planet - and while humans are trying to survive, they often choose the most ruthless paths to do so, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
It's also impressive that Nagamatsu manages to present his story collection as a coherent work of fiction, with some recurring characters and a narrative focus on the evolving world of the pandemic. The whole set-up suggests that this should read as a disparate work, but magically, it doesn't. A very interesting effort, let's see whether it gets nominated for some awards.
January 27, 2022
How to Die Strangely in a Science Fictional Universe
How High We Go in the Dark is a science fiction novel-in-stories tracking the effects and aftermath of a fictional pandemic called the Arctic Plague.
Although this book has ‘A Novel’ printed right there on the cover, it really reads more like a story collection. Typically jaunty sci-fi trappings like space flight, robo-dogs, virtual reality worlds—even a talking pig—are rendered in macabre, sombre tones due to the mass deaths caused by the plague. This is not so much a book about grief as it is about the physical process of death, funerary rites, and mourning customs. Nagamatsu imagines a world overburdened by death in which there are euthanasia rollercoasters, ‘elegy hotels’ for the dying, hologrammatic urns, a group of neighbours planning to commingle their ashes. It’s inventive, but I was never quite sure whether I was reading attempts at black humour that just weren’t funny or attempts at earnestness that were too absurd to take seriously.
Despite being, at a surface-level, extremely topical, How High We Go in the Dark labours under the shadow of its influences. The sadsack loser working a degrading job in a dystopic theme park is classic George Saunders, but Nagamatsu is not able to conjure Saunders’ compassion and empathy. There’s a physicist whose predicament brings to mind Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan. A recurring tattoo à la Cloud Atlas. I was constantly being reminded of other books by everyone from Ray Bradbury to Elizabeth Tan.
What’s more, Nagamatsu retreads his own ideas, with some chapters feeling very similar to earlier ones, repeating story beats about estranged parents, or unrequited crushes on the dying. A traditional novel format would not have allowed for such redundancies. The repetitiveness also extends to word choices (characters ‘sprint’ across rooms; scenes are ‘punctuated’ by some detail or other) and a sameness to the various characters’ narrative voices.
A few intriguing details did crop up—like the transmuting, possibly luminescing internal organs of plague victims—and I wish these had been explored more. But its focus on the practicalities of death in a heightened sci-fi setting is enough to make How High We Go in the Dark an interesting entry in what is shaping up to be a glut of pandemic literature. 3 stars.
How High We Go in the Dark is a science fiction novel-in-stories tracking the effects and aftermath of a fictional pandemic called the Arctic Plague.
Although this book has ‘A Novel’ printed right there on the cover, it really reads more like a story collection. Typically jaunty sci-fi trappings like space flight, robo-dogs, virtual reality worlds—even a talking pig—are rendered in macabre, sombre tones due to the mass deaths caused by the plague. This is not so much a book about grief as it is about the physical process of death, funerary rites, and mourning customs. Nagamatsu imagines a world overburdened by death in which there are euthanasia rollercoasters, ‘elegy hotels’ for the dying, hologrammatic urns, a group of neighbours planning to commingle their ashes. It’s inventive, but I was never quite sure whether I was reading attempts at black humour that just weren’t funny or attempts at earnestness that were too absurd to take seriously.
Despite being, at a surface-level, extremely topical, How High We Go in the Dark labours under the shadow of its influences. The sadsack loser working a degrading job in a dystopic theme park is classic George Saunders, but Nagamatsu is not able to conjure Saunders’ compassion and empathy. There’s a physicist whose predicament brings to mind Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan. A recurring tattoo à la Cloud Atlas. I was constantly being reminded of other books by everyone from Ray Bradbury to Elizabeth Tan.
What’s more, Nagamatsu retreads his own ideas, with some chapters feeling very similar to earlier ones, repeating story beats about estranged parents, or unrequited crushes on the dying. A traditional novel format would not have allowed for such redundancies. The repetitiveness also extends to word choices (characters ‘sprint’ across rooms; scenes are ‘punctuated’ by some detail or other) and a sameness to the various characters’ narrative voices.
A few intriguing details did crop up—like the transmuting, possibly luminescing internal organs of plague victims—and I wish these had been explored more. But its focus on the practicalities of death in a heightened sci-fi setting is enough to make How High We Go in the Dark an interesting entry in what is shaping up to be a glut of pandemic literature. 3 stars.
August 27, 2021
As ambitious as it is intimate, How High We Go in the Dark is both a prescient warning and a promise of human resilience in the face of terrible odds. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say it had undertones of Interstellar and Record of a Spaceborn Few, but it also stands out from both, forming a circle of beautifully interconnected events.
Each compelling story is masterfully threaded into one epic tale, spanning centuries and generations. Sequoia Nagamatsu takes us to a future that seems all too possible, dreaming far beyond our stars while staying rooted to Earth, and reminds us that our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our world.
Each compelling story is masterfully threaded into one epic tale, spanning centuries and generations. Sequoia Nagamatsu takes us to a future that seems all too possible, dreaming far beyond our stars while staying rooted to Earth, and reminds us that our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our world.
June 18, 2023
An interesting perspective on the possibility of apocalypse 🫣 Each chapter is told from a different/new perspective and time. 🤓 It’s somewhat of a sad read.
February 8, 2024
no one is more shocked by my rating than me
April 28, 2023
Fun fact: When Lady Gaga said, "Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before," she was actually talking about this book.
But for real, somehow this book was like the perfect combination of Station Eleven, A Visit from the Goon Squad and Cloud Atlas. Yet somehow felt completely independent of those references and still delivered a fresh, exciting story in many parts that interweave together to create a vivid tapestry.
If you don't like short story collections, then you should check this out because it actually delivers on the whole 'novel told in stories' thing. The book comes together in the end and makes you want to go back and find all the connection points and references you might have missed the first time. I can't wait to revisit this book someday.
Sequoia Nagamatsu, you are a genius.
But for real, somehow this book was like the perfect combination of Station Eleven, A Visit from the Goon Squad and Cloud Atlas. Yet somehow felt completely independent of those references and still delivered a fresh, exciting story in many parts that interweave together to create a vivid tapestry.
If you don't like short story collections, then you should check this out because it actually delivers on the whole 'novel told in stories' thing. The book comes together in the end and makes you want to go back and find all the connection points and references you might have missed the first time. I can't wait to revisit this book someday.
Sequoia Nagamatsu, you are a genius.
February 8, 2023
Absolutely incredibly. So human. I do think the very end was unnecessary, however, still know this one will stay with me for a long time.
April 28, 2022
A prescient collection of linked stories that reveals, in fact, how much worse our own pandemic could have been. Nagamatsu is at his best when he leans into the science fiction, spinning tales of space travel, talking pigs, and last-rites roller coasters. His imagination has room to breathe in these stories, and the pathos really surfaces in a George Saunders sort of way.
I was less impressed with the range of voices he displayed in this collection. If you aren't using original narrators to highlight different voices/reactions/desires/thought patterns, what the hell are you doing it for? Each character voice was that of the writer, who writes in pretty but generic prose. That is, contemporary, lapidary sentences that left no real impression on me.
I was torn on his world-building. In some instances, we can track the slow apocalypse from story to story in just a few scant details, and he lets the plot lines illuminate the current environment to the reader. At other times, the degradation of Earth felt predictable. California wildfires are mentioned several times, as are weather extremes. Yes, we know, that's already happening! What might the world look like in 2050, or 2070, given this pandemic and climate change? He makes half-hearted references to Bitcoin and VR, but those cultural touchstone felt flat and lazy. You're the author who did the research, give us an idea of this new future, no matter how grim it might be.
I was less impressed with the range of voices he displayed in this collection. If you aren't using original narrators to highlight different voices/reactions/desires/thought patterns, what the hell are you doing it for? Each character voice was that of the writer, who writes in pretty but generic prose. That is, contemporary, lapidary sentences that left no real impression on me.
I was torn on his world-building. In some instances, we can track the slow apocalypse from story to story in just a few scant details, and he lets the plot lines illuminate the current environment to the reader. At other times, the degradation of Earth felt predictable. California wildfires are mentioned several times, as are weather extremes. Yes, we know, that's already happening! What might the world look like in 2050, or 2070, given this pandemic and climate change? He makes half-hearted references to Bitcoin and VR, but those cultural touchstone felt flat and lazy. You're the author who did the research, give us an idea of this new future, no matter how grim it might be.
May 4, 2023
A quote from Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower came to me as I was reading this. When discussing the bubonic plague, protagonist Lauren says this:
"Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end. But once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors. It took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change."
On the advent of her own apocalypse, such thinking develops into Lauren's Earthseed religion, based on the belief that God is Change.
There are shades of this idea in How High We Go in the Dark. In it, we are presented with a world significantly altered by plague, with characters socialized for a distanced society, technology replacing interaction and tradition, and careers created specifically for a world so marked by death. Like Lauren's community, struggling in a dystopian world, a solution presented is to leave Earth for the stars.
But there's a stronger theme that resonates with me in this book, even more so than change: the more they stay the same.
Sequoia Nagamatsu's near-future, despite the changes, remains similar to our present. The world is still hyper-capitalist, with funeral and pharmaceutical industries turning plague into profit. Animals are still being exploited by mankind, and unimportant to the point of extinction. Tech is a further necessity for daily life, despite Earth's depleting resources. And care for our planet, one so delicate and finite, stays unprioritized by all but a motivated few.
It's bleak. Very bleak.
But that's not all it is.
For in this book, in its multiple, semi-connected stories, Nagamatsu beautifully illustrates humanity's capacity for pathos. That we are social creatures, no matter how faceless and industrialized our world becomes. That we can acknowledge our mistakes and atone, each in our own way. That we will take care of one another even when so much is lost.
Each story introduces a character, all of them varied and complex, with their own unique challenges from the plague and navigating this uncertain future. No one is a hero. No one is a villain. They are all average folk, each doing what they can and caring as much as they are able. With such limitations, they can't provide the answers to the questions the book asks, nor is there a big bad they can defeat for a happy ending.
All they can do is live and die, grieve, and survive in a world where continuing on is the hardest choice to make. Where saying goodbye to your loved ones when you're not ready to is lauded for the bravery it is.
And in this, I find hope.
Tread lightly with this one if you're actively grieving. Death is a major aspect of this book, though it is never exploited for shock value or cheap emotional pull. Rather, the discussions of death and grief are explored with intention, and what gets conveyed is painfully real. While I was ultimately able to find insight by reading this, it did make me breakdown over the recent death of my brother. I'm still unsure if I was 100% ready to read this.
But it gave me more than it took.
"Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end. But once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors. It took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change."
On the advent of her own apocalypse, such thinking develops into Lauren's Earthseed religion, based on the belief that God is Change.
There are shades of this idea in How High We Go in the Dark. In it, we are presented with a world significantly altered by plague, with characters socialized for a distanced society, technology replacing interaction and tradition, and careers created specifically for a world so marked by death. Like Lauren's community, struggling in a dystopian world, a solution presented is to leave Earth for the stars.
But there's a stronger theme that resonates with me in this book, even more so than change: the more they stay the same.
Sequoia Nagamatsu's near-future, despite the changes, remains similar to our present. The world is still hyper-capitalist, with funeral and pharmaceutical industries turning plague into profit. Animals are still being exploited by mankind, and unimportant to the point of extinction. Tech is a further necessity for daily life, despite Earth's depleting resources. And care for our planet, one so delicate and finite, stays unprioritized by all but a motivated few.
It's bleak. Very bleak.
But that's not all it is.
For in this book, in its multiple, semi-connected stories, Nagamatsu beautifully illustrates humanity's capacity for pathos. That we are social creatures, no matter how faceless and industrialized our world becomes. That we can acknowledge our mistakes and atone, each in our own way. That we will take care of one another even when so much is lost.
Each story introduces a character, all of them varied and complex, with their own unique challenges from the plague and navigating this uncertain future. No one is a hero. No one is a villain. They are all average folk, each doing what they can and caring as much as they are able. With such limitations, they can't provide the answers to the questions the book asks, nor is there a big bad they can defeat for a happy ending.
All they can do is live and die, grieve, and survive in a world where continuing on is the hardest choice to make. Where saying goodbye to your loved ones when you're not ready to is lauded for the bravery it is.
And in this, I find hope.
Tread lightly with this one if you're actively grieving. Death is a major aspect of this book, though it is never exploited for shock value or cheap emotional pull. Rather, the discussions of death and grief are explored with intention, and what gets conveyed is painfully real. While I was ultimately able to find insight by reading this, it did make me breakdown over the recent death of my brother. I'm still unsure if I was 100% ready to read this.
But it gave me more than it took.
February 22, 2022
QUICK TAKE: I loved it. With so many pandemic books in the marketplace, this one still seemed to elevate itself above so many other titles in the genre. Loved the small connections between characters in each story, and ultimately there was a great message of hope and humanity amidst the darkness of some of the stories. Huge recommend.
January 31, 2022
It’s possible I will read more disappointing books this year, but How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is my first of 2022. I read glowing reviews of this novel and when the ARC showed up at work, I seized it with enthusiasm. Ugh. This novel lacks everything that makes a great story: world-building, complex characters, and a coherent storyline. This isn’t a novel; it’s a collection of stories sort of, kind of, connected by repeated characters who you don’t know well enough to distinguish one from the other—and if you confuse the characters, you certainly don’t give a damn about their lives. This is a very disappointing novel.
To be clear, I read the ARC and not the finished, published edition.
HHWGitD is a story of a pandemic that mostly affects children, usually fatally. The novel takes place over (eventually) thousands of years and focuses on individual characters and how they experienced and lived with the pandemic. The novel is ultimately about how humanity adapts to catastrophic climate change and a deadly pandemic. It has a message of bland heartwarming goodness and overall tear-jerker manipulation that irritated the shit out of me.
I hated this book right from the beginning although I tried to fool myself that I didn’t hate it because the publisher’s blurb made it sound so awesome and weird (a theme park for dying children? A talking pig? Spaceships searching for a new planet? Oh, yeah!) that I wanted to love it and keep reading. I figured I needed to give the book more time to reveal its awesomeness to me. Well, I read nearly the whole book until I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. The story is boring, there’s no plot, the characters are names with very little personality attached to them and the pandemic/climatic change is so poorly defined I have only the vaguest comprehension of what’s going on and what’s go on is: the world is going to hell.
The consistent backstory is the plague/pandemic. The world is already dying from flooding, overheating, pollution, etc. (basically our very real potential environmental disaster) when researchers in the Arctic Circle uncover a very long dead girl who seems to have died from some kind of virus. This virus quickly spreads around the world, killing children at a much higher rate than adults. The novel is separated into sections that focus on different characters and their experiences. The stories move forward in time and sometimes the characters reappear, sometimes not. The characters are all connected—in one story you read about Yumi and Miki, then you later you read about Yumi the grown-up and she’s connected somehow to the character(s) in a different story—a brother, sister, girlfriend, etc. This structure isn’t really a problem; it’s that the author doesn’t provide any real information on the pandemic or what’s happening in the world. I need some kind of background to anchor my characters to; if I don’t understand the world they are living in and the horrific conditions they are facing, how do I connect with them? That’s my biggest problem: I have absolutely no personal connection to these characters. I feel nothing for them. The only character who touched my grouchy, stone cold soul was Snortorius the talking pig. Even then the author ruined him by making him so damn noble and forgiving of his human captors/scientists who are basically using him (and his pig kindred) as living incubators to grow human body parts that I was irritated.
Every story is written from the first person point of view. This is a problem because every character sounds the same. Male, female, Asian, white, whatever (and, for those of you who keep track, I don’t think there are any transgender or queer/gay/bi characters) (and even if they were, I don’t think it would matter so much because all the damn characters sound like the same bland, kind of male-ish person). So the characters are boring. What about the plot? Ha. What plot? I don’t think there is one. Which would be okay because this isn’t a thriller, but I get little sense of forward motion or what the novel is trying to accomplish other than to make me sad for the characters and cheer them on as they struggle to persevere in this terrible, tragic world. I find the author’s visions of the future to be unrealistic. First, a death theme park for kids. Parents go to this theme park to basically euthanize their kids. There’s a roller coaster that has a drop high enough/fast enough to have so many g forces (or something) that it kills the kids instantly (along with the help of some kind of drug administered by the staff before the kid gets on the coaster). Um, so can you see this happening? Seriously? Parents taking their kids to a theme park to kill them? The kids are dying anyway, the thought is, so why not let them die in a fun way? Not only is this incredibly unrealistic (I can’t see American thoughts/values changing so much by 2030 that this would even be remotely feasible) but how many small kids (and these kids are generally preteens) want to go on a roller coaster with this kind of a drop? Wouldn’t they be scared shitless? This whole theme park/roller coaster death ride is creepy and weird. Granted, that’s probably at least part of the impression the author wants to give, but in Nagamatsu’s story, he doesn’t mention any real public outcry over this. And it’s not government-sponsored euthanasia; it’s some weirdo billionaire’s idea of how to (gently?) put dying kids out of their misery.
The death roller coaster isn’t the only unrealistic part of the novel for me. Because so many people are dying (again—how many? Adults? Children? Worldwide? Just America? Who the fuck knows?), the funeral industry has expanded to include “elegy hotels” staffed with “bereavement coordinators.” These hotels are basically places that families can rent to spend a few days with their dead loved ones:
The other chapters/stories are more of the same. One in particular, “Through the Garden of Memory,” I hated. It was eye-rollingly stupid and had no connection to the theme of the novel. Hint: .
The rest of this novel is basically the same: characters mentioned earlier randomly show up and connect with other characters from other stories. They all have sad stories about losing someone they loved. But they deal with that through art or (most annoyingly) writing a lot of letters to dead people. So many letters to dead people. Eventually some of these characters get on a spaceship that was designed in part by yet another character who is connected to this other character…eye roll. I don’t fucking care. There’s some kind of weird alien life thing at the end (I’m guessing somewhat since I hate this book so much I can’t even skim the last 44 pages) and they find another life-sustaining planet and who gives a fuck. Not I. It’s boring, the prose is borderline sappy/melodramatic, there’s no real story and the characters are faceless and bland. The publisher’s blurb compares this novel to Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven. I haven’t read Cloud Atlas so I can’t comment on the comparison except to say that if the comparison holds true, I have no interest in reading Cloud Atlas. As for Station Eleven, in no way does this novel compare to the amazing, extraordinary, complex, beautifully written S11. Nope. Both of them have a pandemic backstory, but that’s it. S11 is millions of light years better. I don’t recommend HHWGitD. It’s deadly boring and didn’t even give me a different perspective on the pandemic or, basically, anything.
To be clear, I read the ARC and not the finished, published edition.
HHWGitD is a story of a pandemic that mostly affects children, usually fatally. The novel takes place over (eventually) thousands of years and focuses on individual characters and how they experienced and lived with the pandemic. The novel is ultimately about how humanity adapts to catastrophic climate change and a deadly pandemic. It has a message of bland heartwarming goodness and overall tear-jerker manipulation that irritated the shit out of me.
I hated this book right from the beginning although I tried to fool myself that I didn’t hate it because the publisher’s blurb made it sound so awesome and weird (a theme park for dying children? A talking pig? Spaceships searching for a new planet? Oh, yeah!) that I wanted to love it and keep reading. I figured I needed to give the book more time to reveal its awesomeness to me. Well, I read nearly the whole book until I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. The story is boring, there’s no plot, the characters are names with very little personality attached to them and the pandemic/climatic change is so poorly defined I have only the vaguest comprehension of what’s going on and what’s go on is: the world is going to hell.
The consistent backstory is the plague/pandemic. The world is already dying from flooding, overheating, pollution, etc. (basically our very real potential environmental disaster) when researchers in the Arctic Circle uncover a very long dead girl who seems to have died from some kind of virus. This virus quickly spreads around the world, killing children at a much higher rate than adults. The novel is separated into sections that focus on different characters and their experiences. The stories move forward in time and sometimes the characters reappear, sometimes not. The characters are all connected—in one story you read about Yumi and Miki, then you later you read about Yumi the grown-up and she’s connected somehow to the character(s) in a different story—a brother, sister, girlfriend, etc. This structure isn’t really a problem; it’s that the author doesn’t provide any real information on the pandemic or what’s happening in the world. I need some kind of background to anchor my characters to; if I don’t understand the world they are living in and the horrific conditions they are facing, how do I connect with them? That’s my biggest problem: I have absolutely no personal connection to these characters. I feel nothing for them. The only character who touched my grouchy, stone cold soul was Snortorius the talking pig. Even then the author ruined him by making him so damn noble and forgiving of his human captors/scientists who are basically using him (and his pig kindred) as living incubators to grow human body parts that I was irritated.
Every story is written from the first person point of view. This is a problem because every character sounds the same. Male, female, Asian, white, whatever (and, for those of you who keep track, I don’t think there are any transgender or queer/gay/bi characters) (and even if they were, I don’t think it would matter so much because all the damn characters sound like the same bland, kind of male-ish person). So the characters are boring. What about the plot? Ha. What plot? I don’t think there is one. Which would be okay because this isn’t a thriller, but I get little sense of forward motion or what the novel is trying to accomplish other than to make me sad for the characters and cheer them on as they struggle to persevere in this terrible, tragic world. I find the author’s visions of the future to be unrealistic. First, a death theme park for kids. Parents go to this theme park to basically euthanize their kids. There’s a roller coaster that has a drop high enough/fast enough to have so many g forces (or something) that it kills the kids instantly (along with the help of some kind of drug administered by the staff before the kid gets on the coaster). Um, so can you see this happening? Seriously? Parents taking their kids to a theme park to kill them? The kids are dying anyway, the thought is, so why not let them die in a fun way? Not only is this incredibly unrealistic (I can’t see American thoughts/values changing so much by 2030 that this would even be remotely feasible) but how many small kids (and these kids are generally preteens) want to go on a roller coaster with this kind of a drop? Wouldn’t they be scared shitless? This whole theme park/roller coaster death ride is creepy and weird. Granted, that’s probably at least part of the impression the author wants to give, but in Nagamatsu’s story, he doesn’t mention any real public outcry over this. And it’s not government-sponsored euthanasia; it’s some weirdo billionaire’s idea of how to (gently?) put dying kids out of their misery.
The death roller coaster isn’t the only unrealistic part of the novel for me. Because so many people are dying (again—how many? Adults? Children? Worldwide? Just America? Who the fuck knows?), the funeral industry has expanded to include “elegy hotels” staffed with “bereavement coordinators.” These hotels are basically places that families can rent to spend a few days with their dead loved ones:
we were just glorified bellhops for the mountains of Arctic plague victims awaiting cremation, for the families who wanted to curl up in a suite beside the corpses of their loved ones and heal. On any given day, the deceased from local hospitals lined the basement halls in biohazard bags, waiting to go through the three-part preservation process—sterilization, embalming, and our antibacterial plasticizing treatment. This bought families time to say goodbye while our crematoriums struggled to keep up with the demand (103).The narrator mentions he gets paid in crypto holdings, a combination of “funerary inc” tokens and Bitcoin. Later the narrator mentions seeing billboards that urge consumers to spend the funerary tokens on the living and death hotels advertising families to “sleep with your loved ones on their way to eternal slumber.” I find all of this unrealistic. If people were dying in numbers like this, wouldn’t it be more possible that government would be breaking down? Dead people in the streets? Mass graves and (more likely) mass cremations? Because the author has done such a poor job of world-building, I can’t buy his image of this pandemic-ravaged world (or United States).
The other chapters/stories are more of the same. One in particular, “Through the Garden of Memory,” I hated. It was eye-rollingly stupid and had no connection to the theme of the novel. Hint: .
The rest of this novel is basically the same: characters mentioned earlier randomly show up and connect with other characters from other stories. They all have sad stories about losing someone they loved. But they deal with that through art or (most annoyingly) writing a lot of letters to dead people. So many letters to dead people. Eventually some of these characters get on a spaceship that was designed in part by yet another character who is connected to this other character…eye roll. I don’t fucking care. There’s some kind of weird alien life thing at the end (I’m guessing somewhat since I hate this book so much I can’t even skim the last 44 pages) and they find another life-sustaining planet and who gives a fuck. Not I. It’s boring, the prose is borderline sappy/melodramatic, there’s no real story and the characters are faceless and bland. The publisher’s blurb compares this novel to Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven. I haven’t read Cloud Atlas so I can’t comment on the comparison except to say that if the comparison holds true, I have no interest in reading Cloud Atlas. As for Station Eleven, in no way does this novel compare to the amazing, extraordinary, complex, beautifully written S11. Nope. Both of them have a pandemic backstory, but that’s it. S11 is millions of light years better. I don’t recommend HHWGitD. It’s deadly boring and didn’t even give me a different perspective on the pandemic or, basically, anything.
September 17, 2022
This was such an interesting piece. Nagamatsu plays with a lot of sci-fi tropes and puts them all together to build a somewhat separate but interweaving story about many people over the world and over hundreds of years and their experiences and reactions to a global pandemic. Some of the stories are still on my mind and some others not so much. Very readable and I kept wanting to read more. Loved the ways the stories connected. This made me think. Very interested in what this author writes next
February 15, 2022
This was a fantastic read..it starts with a man visiting the Arctic to see where his scientist daughter died, all because a virus that the melting polar ice has revealed. From there the story moves through new characters and pieces in a global virus situation. Many of the characters are Japanese American or even just Japanese, many are scientists deep in the thick of working on aspects of the virus, but there are other characters that come up as well. The topics of death and dying are rich with cultural nuance (some people attend cremations and pick through the remaining bone fragments as part of the death ritual) and complications because of a lack of travel. Climate change and family separation are frequent themes, and some of the chapters are pretty "out there" in ways I think the reader will enjoy discovering.
I'll talk more about this book on an upcoming podcast (240) and probably still not cover everything, but what a debut! It's fantastic and a bit morbid and it was a great read. I can see why some compare him to David Mitchell, whom I love, and in some ways I'd connect it to Bewilderment by Richard Powers as well. There is a lot on death and dying in here, so treat yourself with care, as it might not be the right time.
I'll talk more about this book on an upcoming podcast (240) and probably still not cover everything, but what a debut! It's fantastic and a bit morbid and it was a great read. I can see why some compare him to David Mitchell, whom I love, and in some ways I'd connect it to Bewilderment by Richard Powers as well. There is a lot on death and dying in here, so treat yourself with care, as it might not be the right time.
December 8, 2022
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ ½
Genre: Science Fiction + Dystopia
It is the year 2030, and an ancient virus is awakened from the remains of a girl who died a long time ago. The epidemic will spread throughout the entire planet. Survival becomes extremely difficult as humanity is put in danger. The story follows a set of characters as they struggle to stay alive, come to terms with their losses, and take on new challenges.
The world-building in this book is quite good, and it is one of its strongest aspects. However, the author tries to shed light on different characters and different situations. And I feel this is the novel’s biggest problem. I couldn’t connect much with these characters because the length of the novel didn’t help. In 300 pages, trying to tell different stories means that the impact that the stories will have will be less.
There are a few sub-themes in the story, like the loss of a child or tension between parents and their children. These sub-themes serve well and offer a variety of storytelling opportunities. So this is another plus for the book. The writing itself is rich and suits the genre, at times it is melancholic, which goes well with the bigger theme. How High We Go in the Dark is an entertaining science fiction book, but the impact it is trying to make is watered down due to the multiple storylines.
Genre: Science Fiction + Dystopia
It is the year 2030, and an ancient virus is awakened from the remains of a girl who died a long time ago. The epidemic will spread throughout the entire planet. Survival becomes extremely difficult as humanity is put in danger. The story follows a set of characters as they struggle to stay alive, come to terms with their losses, and take on new challenges.
The world-building in this book is quite good, and it is one of its strongest aspects. However, the author tries to shed light on different characters and different situations. And I feel this is the novel’s biggest problem. I couldn’t connect much with these characters because the length of the novel didn’t help. In 300 pages, trying to tell different stories means that the impact that the stories will have will be less.
There are a few sub-themes in the story, like the loss of a child or tension between parents and their children. These sub-themes serve well and offer a variety of storytelling opportunities. So this is another plus for the book. The writing itself is rich and suits the genre, at times it is melancholic, which goes well with the bigger theme. How High We Go in the Dark is an entertaining science fiction book, but the impact it is trying to make is watered down due to the multiple storylines.
January 28, 2023
This book started off interesting though I got bored with it over time. How High We Go in the Dark contains several interconnected stories in a world ravaged by a climate change-induced pandemic. We follow protagonists including a man who works at a euthanasia park for terminally ill children, a scientist who finds a second chance at fatherhood when a pig in his lab develops human speech, a father searching for his daughter who prioritized her environmental justice work over her family, and more. Common themes include a search for connection and the decisions people make at the end of the world.
The first few stories in this collection touched my heart. Sequoia Nagamatsu also conveys interesting concepts throughout How High We Go in the Dark. However, over time I felt that the emotional atmosphere of the stories got repetitive – they’re sad and gloomy though they don’t approach sadness and gloominess in particularly striking ways, at least as a whole. I agree with this Goodreads reviewer that several of the characters felt more like concepts than fully fleshed-out protagonists. I liked the majority Asian cast and the themes of environmental devastation, even if I did want more overall.
The first few stories in this collection touched my heart. Sequoia Nagamatsu also conveys interesting concepts throughout How High We Go in the Dark. However, over time I felt that the emotional atmosphere of the stories got repetitive – they’re sad and gloomy though they don’t approach sadness and gloominess in particularly striking ways, at least as a whole. I agree with this Goodreads reviewer that several of the characters felt more like concepts than fully fleshed-out protagonists. I liked the majority Asian cast and the themes of environmental devastation, even if I did want more overall.
March 8, 2023
An ancient plague released from the Arctic permafrost through global warming begins to decimate the world. Victim's cells begin to work erratically, kidneys hard at work trying to become lungs, brain cells convinced they need to be building a heart. The body shuts down, skin becomes translucent and those infected slip into a coma and die. Death becomes so prevalent that the funerary industry has completely taken over the banking system giving rise to Mortuary cryptocurrencies and the ubiquitous presence of funerary skyscrapers and malls across the nation's cities.
How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories where each chapter is a meditation on grief and loss in the face of this global pandemic. But it's lovely, hopeful and wild. When the stakes are this high it's all that much more important that there is love and community and the persistent impulse to keep moving forward. When the end of the world comes it's not the doomsday preppers hoarding canned goods that survive. Those who make meaningful connections, retain hope and create neighbourhoods where everyone works together to build abundance - that's where the magic lies.
Nagamatsu connects these disparate stories and callbacks abound with little details travelling across chapters until they resolve into a larger whole. I fell in love with a talking pig and a widowed introvert tentatively inviting his neighbours for a BBQ. I thrilled at the euthanasia theme park and the forensic body farm. I saw the inevitability of death being commercialized with shared urns where neighbours could intermix their ashes to save on money and space, contrasted with elegy hotels where the plasticized dead are preserved as crematories struggle to keep up with demand, and inventive disposal techniques abound like liquifying remains to be turned into ice sculptures to melt into the sea.
But these are just wonderful bits of colour and detail among the more restrained explorations of grief and loss and love that just hit me where I live.
How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories where each chapter is a meditation on grief and loss in the face of this global pandemic. But it's lovely, hopeful and wild. When the stakes are this high it's all that much more important that there is love and community and the persistent impulse to keep moving forward. When the end of the world comes it's not the doomsday preppers hoarding canned goods that survive. Those who make meaningful connections, retain hope and create neighbourhoods where everyone works together to build abundance - that's where the magic lies.
Nagamatsu connects these disparate stories and callbacks abound with little details travelling across chapters until they resolve into a larger whole. I fell in love with a talking pig and a widowed introvert tentatively inviting his neighbours for a BBQ. I thrilled at the euthanasia theme park and the forensic body farm. I saw the inevitability of death being commercialized with shared urns where neighbours could intermix their ashes to save on money and space, contrasted with elegy hotels where the plasticized dead are preserved as crematories struggle to keep up with demand, and inventive disposal techniques abound like liquifying remains to be turned into ice sculptures to melt into the sea.
But these are just wonderful bits of colour and detail among the more restrained explorations of grief and loss and love that just hit me where I live.
September 18, 2022
Heartbreaking, soul shattering, deeply emotional, but beautifully done. How High We Go In the Dark is a collection of interconnected stories all surrounding a devastating climate plague. Each story takes place in a different point in time, all chronicling humanities response to the world wide pandemic. As with most collections, there were some stories I preferred over others, but I was never bored once, even though this is not a fast paced novel by any means. Another new favorite!!!
November 17, 2021
This is definitely one of those reviews where I remember just how subjective they are. This was a 3 star book for me, but I think it's objectively a better book than that.
Objectively, it's ambitious and interesting, emotionally intimate but structurally similar to bold books like CLOUD ATLAS. Centered around a strange pandemic that spreads around the world, it stares mortality straight in the face. Most of it takes place within the same period of time, but some of it is vastly farther in the future or almost infinitely back in the past. And I love having a book through interconnected stories where most of the characters were Japanese or Japanese-American even though the scope of the book is about a worldwide calamity. (Most books with this kind of structure tend to be mostly about white people so I don't see why we can't have this.)
Personally, despite me enjoying "dark" books I found this was another thing entirely and scaled more towards "bleak." I admit I had a hard time finishing it because it was hard to muster the energy to pick it up. Especially in the first half of the book, many of the dead and dying are children. And even though the disease can take on some unusual and even fantastic symptoms, it is still a book about the way we approach death when there is so much of it staring us in the face every day. I can be a pretty pessimistic person and reading this as a pessimist was rough, I will not lie. But I also can't say it was bad, it was beautifully written and I found Nagamatsu's style unique.
Objectively, it's ambitious and interesting, emotionally intimate but structurally similar to bold books like CLOUD ATLAS. Centered around a strange pandemic that spreads around the world, it stares mortality straight in the face. Most of it takes place within the same period of time, but some of it is vastly farther in the future or almost infinitely back in the past. And I love having a book through interconnected stories where most of the characters were Japanese or Japanese-American even though the scope of the book is about a worldwide calamity. (Most books with this kind of structure tend to be mostly about white people so I don't see why we can't have this.)
Personally, despite me enjoying "dark" books I found this was another thing entirely and scaled more towards "bleak." I admit I had a hard time finishing it because it was hard to muster the energy to pick it up. Especially in the first half of the book, many of the dead and dying are children. And even though the disease can take on some unusual and even fantastic symptoms, it is still a book about the way we approach death when there is so much of it staring us in the face every day. I can be a pretty pessimistic person and reading this as a pessimist was rough, I will not lie. But I also can't say it was bad, it was beautifully written and I found Nagamatsu's style unique.
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