How I wrote The Dog Stars, the novel behind Ridley Scott’s new film

The Dog Stars was my first novel. It begins nine years after a super-flu pandemic kills off most of humanity. Hig lives with his old dog Jasper at a little country airport in Erie, north of Denver, Colorado, which he shares with a gun nut named Bangley who has been waiting for the apocalypse his whole life. Hig has lost his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and all his friends, and he and Jasper fly a patrol every day in their 1956 Cessna searching for survivors.

When I sat down to write the book, I didn’t want to plot or outline. I had wanted to be a fiction writer since I was 11, but when I got out of college, I had to make a living and so I wrote for magazines. With every story I wrote I knew the ending, and I knew what was going to happen next, because it happened. It was journalism. Now, I didn’t want to know. I grew up as a kayaker and what I loved about running rivers was that if the stream had never been descended or described, you came around a tight bend in a canyon and there might be a waterfall, or a cougar drinking, or a flight of backlit swallows. I wanted the same thrill writing the novel. I wanted to launch onto a narrative current and follow it into wild new territory.

Also, poetry was my first love. The novels I adored were the most lyrical. Conrad at the height of his power, in the grips of a typhoon. Faulkner following the cadence of the words into the mind of a smitten cow. Welty describing a slow stream. They seemed to be as much about the music of the language as any story. I knew that I would have to be enamoured first, of the sound of my own language, and follow the song into the narrative.

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I went to the coffee shop in my neighborhood in Denver and I sat down and told myself, “Don’t think, don’t think, just listen.” I wrote, “I keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap. I foresee attacks…” A few lines later, “My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”

I sat up. “Speak,” I murmured. “You are a fisherman, just like me.” And then it was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table and I knew the other patrons were thinking, “That poor sonofabitch is going through a bad divorce. Or his dog died.” But really, I was completely transported, and more thrilled than I’d ever been in my life.

Hig’s plane, the Beast, is one of the most prominent characters in the novel. Hig and I had a few stories about it to help fill out the novel. Once on a trip to kayak a wilderness river in Montana with one of my oldest friends, we got a ride to the river on a single engine Cessna into a remote backcountry airstrip. This was before I wrote the book. The pilot flew so close to the ridges I could see the elk tracks zigzagging in the snow. I was fascinated. I said, “Hey, how fast could I learn to fly like this? Could I do it for an article?”

The pilot was a cowboy in every sense, had a handlebar moustache and a brash manner. He said, “Gimme five grand and three weeks of your time and we’ll get her done!”

He was fired two weeks later for drinking on the job. But the chief pilot of the little airport was one of the greatest bush pilots alive, and he gave the thumbs up. Dave Hoerner had 30,000 hours flying wildlife biologists into the mountains to track grizzly bears and wolves. The most dangerous kind of flying. I went back up to Kalispell and flew three times a day and studied aviation books at night. I got my pilot’s license in 20 days. I bought a 1956 Cessna 182 single engine plane. The engine was timed out, meaning it had run so many hours I was required to rebuild it, but I thought I could nurse it along. It’s the same plane Hig flies, same colour, same tail number: N6333A. And I kept it in Hig’s hangar at the Erie airport. Soon after I bought the Beast, the engine died, right over the Continental Divide, and we had just enough altitude to glide home. In The Dog Stars, Hig flies past his point of no return looking for human connection.

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Eight years after I published the novel, on a cool day in March of 2020, Denver shut down for the Covid pandemic. I went fishing that afternoon in a state park south of town. There was no ranger at the gate, I just drove in. Eerie. No other fishermen parked in the gravel lot by the river. I waded into a lovely stretch that bends through a grove of old cottonwoods and began to cast. Alone, the way Hig does in the book. And the only fish feeding were white suckers. There were no trout that night, as in the novel. The sun settled on the ridge and the evening chilled and I got goosebumps, and not just from the temperature. I drove home up a large boulevard, the only car, and every business on either side of the road was shut.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was as if Hig had transported into my world, or I into his. Again.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Tinder Press) is the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.

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