I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This was not really my thing, but it will find an audience. Paranormal meets suspense. Someone will love it.

I really, really enjoyed this book, very much looking forward to the next one! Definitely recommend.

It starts with a teenage girl, who drops everything and begins "sleepwalking" one day, barefoot, down the road. Nothing wakes her. Nothing can stop her without causing her body to overheat and start hemorrhaging. As she walks, others with the same mysterious condition join her and a herd of sleepwalkers forms. Soon, a whole caravan is following the sleepwalkers: distraught family and friends, the CDC, law enforcement, and the media, and no one seems to have any answers about what's causing the bizarre disorder.

Wanderers weaves together many disparate cultural elements and fears, including AI, climate change, epidemics, and the alt-right. It does this well, creating a believable apocalyptic tale. I don't find many apocalyptic or dystopian stories to be believable because they tend to get a lot of things wrong about how people react to crises. This one does feel accurate to how people would behave in a crisis with those starting conditions.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Because the pacing isn't rushed, it has the opportunity to explore how the characters react to change and wrestle with mortality. Alongside these contemplative themes are plenty of thrilling twists and revelations.

Trigger warning: rape (male victim) and torture, both pretty graphic.

Mr. Wendig creates vivid, enticing and provocative scenarios. As dystopian genre continues to take off literally and visually this creative work will captivate numerous types of readers with its realism and intriguing take on many of today's current issues and concerns. Possibly a bit longer than needed, but well worth the time, "Wanders" stays on track and presents the reader with an enjoyable trek through the possibilities of our rapidly changing world. The true test for us readaholics- I had trouble staying away and found myself returning to read asap!

Thank you for an early copy!! I loved the storyline and character development! If you love Stephen King, you will enjoy this book!

This book took me a while to get through. But, I'm glad I stuck with it. The apocalyptic aspect is not something I am typically drawn to, but I enjoyed this story.

I received an advance reading copy via Netgalley.

What makes <i>Wanderers</i> such an intense, disturbing read isn't that it's gory--though it has some major moments of that. Or that it spins the apocalypse in a sinister new way; sneezing as you read will creep you out, trust me. Or that Chuck Wendig is from a GRRM school of writers where no one is sacred or safe; seriously, expect a lot of death, torture, and even a graphic rape mixed in. What makes this book such a successful psychological trip is that Wendig brings a deep level of humanity to the full cast. I came to care about these people, so as the tension ratchets up--and wow, does it ratchet up--I felt the compulsion to sneak in reading time as often as I could to find out what happens next.

I don't read a lot of thrillers or watch horror movies for that reason. They tend to really get to me. But I really enjoy Wendig's other writing, and couldn't help but be curious about the book because of the buzz it's generating. I was happy that the publisher approved me to read it early. Now, with the book done, I'm feeling a mix of awe and relief and trauma. <i>Wanderers</i> is well done even as the content is absolutely horrible.

The premise is bizarre to start: in the Midwest, disparate people enter a bizarre sleepwalking state. They don't need food or water or to even defecate. Their skin is impenetrable to needles. Bad things happen if you try to hold them back. As the group walks, more people join as sleepwalkers--and other loyal family members follow, becoming loyal shepherds, even as the rest of the country and world squabble about if this is a terror attack or infection or what.

As I mentioned earlier, this book is intense, sometimes very gory and outright disturbing. There were a couple scenes that really got to me, and if they'd happened early on, I probably would have stopped reading right there. As dark as the book is, though, there is still a sense of hope and humor throughout. This is about people being people, with the full spectrum of hate and nastiness and love and joy.

All of the buzz around this book is justified. I know in my case, this is a read that will haunt me for a long while to come.

Shana Stewart wakes up one morning on her family farm and notices her sister Nessie wandering down the road. When Shana catches up with Nessie, she believes her sister is sleepwalking.
As Nessie walks through town, seemingly unaware of her own actions and unable to be awakened, another person soon joins her.
Shana doesn't know where her sister and the growing number of sleepwalkers are headed but they are slowly making their way across the country with an intense determination and their number is climbing steadily. The group becomes known as the flock and the friends/family who follow and protect them known as shepherds.

America is soon divided about the meaning of the sleepwalkers. Is it a terrorist attack? The beginning of Armageddon? A disease?

Along their journey, readers meet a vibrant cast of characters, including an aging rock star, a preacher whose family and faith are in crisis, a wealthy businessman trying to escape the shadow of his family's legacy, and a group of scientists with the CDC; including the disgraced Dr. Benjamin Ray whose involvement is sanctioned by a mysterious piece of artificial intelligence known as Black Swan.

When Black Swan alerts Dr. Ray and his team to a body discovered in the Everglades, it appears at first to be entirely unrelated to the sleepwalkers until an epidemic sweeps the country and everything from government to religion crumbles in the chaos, the only constant being the sleepwalkers steadily moving toward their unknown destination.

It's up to Dr. Ray, his team, and the shepherds to protect the flock from a violent militia that preys on people's fear and faith and discover how everything connects before the world as they know it ends.

Wanderers is an epic saga that covers everything from politics, science, religion, good vs. evil, and the power of technology with a rich cast of characters that add to the story sometimes in superficial and other times vital ways.

This book will certainly be compared to Stephen King's The Stand but it manages to hold its own with a modern-day message and by focusing on the actual apocalypse rather than its aftermath.

At 800 pages, there is of course a lot of build-up; we're introduced to so many characters who shape the entire story and that takes time.
Readers are completely in the dark for the entire first half of the book; we know the events but not how or why they're connected so it can be frustrating to wade through almost 400 pages without any real movement on the plot itself.
The ending. Oh the ending. All that carefully crafted build-up for a mediocre showdown (which coincidentally was my main complaint with The Stand). Everything has been building toward this moment and readers get a few pages of limited action. It just wasn't enough after that long journey to be given a rushed "five years later" catch-up that concludes with an open ending.

All that said, it's a fantastic journey that I was completely invested in, personally. The plot is heavy but entertaining, the questions raised are both compelling and thought-provoking, and most of the characters are well-developed.

If you enjoyed The Stand, odds are that you'll enjoy this novel also.
If this 800 page behemoth seems daunting, it's a coin toss to recommend: on the one hand, it was a highly entertaining saga of an apocalyptic epidemic and I enjoyed the long journey, but on the other hand, the pay-off wasn't completely satisfying with a rushed finale and frustrating open ending.

Thanks to Del Rey Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Wanderers is scheduled for release on July 2, 2019.

A dark and powerful apocalyptic novel that mirrors our current political climate a little too closely for comfort at times. Highly recommended for fans of Stephen King's The Stand or Under the Dome.

Scifi litfic isn't something I would have assumed I'd love, but boi was I wrong. The sleep walkers aspect was extremely fascinating and also entertaining.

This was an end of the world apolyptic tale about sleepwalkers and the folks that follow them (to keep them safe?)!

This was good and it kept me going to the end, however, there did seem to be a LOT of characters to keep track of.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for this advanced readers copy. Release date is set for July 2019.

The Wanderers by Chuck Wendig is a great horror book in the vein of The Stand! Well worth the read and will keep you turning pages until the last one.

I've tried two or three of Wendig's books and they're not really my thing. I spend a lot of time reading what is often called "literary science fiction" so when I switch back to books written in a more popular b vein the difference is fairly striking. That's what happened to me with this one.

I've given Wendig a fair chance now but I'm moving on. I'm sure the majority of readers who pick this up will like it.

Running against the herd here, but this one simply didn’t work. Speaking of herds, if you’ve watched enough Walking Dead, you know about the dead 💀 wandering in herds. Here, you get a similar phenomenon with eyes bulging and consciousness seeping out they walk toward a goal like the folks in Close Encounters with shepherds tending to them. The survival of the species might be at stake, but that all gets lost in a story with shifting points of view and an attempt to throw politics religion and rockstardom in together. In the end, you didn’t care where this was going or where the end was. Onward!

This is an epic novel and a huge undertaking. The various characters are all so different and unique and their voices consistent and believable. The scariest part is how realistic the plot is. Great!

The concept is simple: a large swatch of Americans contract an unknown sleep-walking disease and begin trekking across America. Their friends and families begin “shepherding” them, protecting them from the elements while the CDC works to determine the cause of the sickness and prevent it from spreading. As more people contract the disease and join the “flock”, various groups use it to their advantage (religious zealots claim it’s the apocalypse; the alt-right blames big pharma, etc.). While i thought it was going to be dystopic, the book is actually very contemporary and relevant, exploring themes such as family, religion, fake news, the opioid epidemic. The story is epic in scope with multiple character access points, and at its center is a beautiful story about two sisters: one is patient zero, the other will follow her sick sister to the ends of the earth to protect her. If you love big, epic swings (think THE STAND) and can handle the page-count (800+), then this is a definite read.

This book is massive but reads quickly. I would have give it 5 stars except for the language, and violence. TW for rape. Also, there seemed to be a plot hole or two by the end and speaking of which, what was with that ending!?! Still, it's an engaging read with lots of twists and turns. I'd recommend it to fans of apocalyptic thrillers.

In this immensely creative story, it appears that end times have begun in the United States and around the world. When sleepwalkers begin their journey across the country while a strange disease begins to make its way also, a key group of people are racing to find answers and a cure.

I was drawn into this story from the very first chapter and I have to admit that I would never have guessed how this would all play out. This novel makes several political statements and the characters are all flawed in some manner, which only makes it more interesting. I really enjoy this book.

I received a pre-release copy of this book from NetGalley.

If nothing else, Wanderers deserves the highest praise for the title of its 42nd chapter: “The Ultimate Answer”. Likewise its kind words regarding the efforts of reference librarians such as myself. Which is not to say that there is nothing else in the book that deserves praise. In fact, there’s a whole lot of real good “else” to it.

There is a lot going on in this book. I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I’ll give a warning now that some plot points will be discussed. The pitch for the book is that some sort of disease sweeps through humanity. The book opens with the formation of a flock of sleepwalkers, people who turn into mindless drones and walk tirelessly to some unknown destination. Surely, the reader thinks, THIS is the plague that will wipe out humanity. These must be the titular Wanderers, and we will all succumb.

But this, it turns out, is not the case at all. Through some seemingly non-sequitur chapters, the true culprit is eventually revealed. As it must, the real disease spreads itself throughout humanity and things start to go wrong.

There are parts where the book may get a little TOO REAL. There is a sub-plot regarding a surely completely fictional right-wing businessman presidential candidate who does his utmost to stoke fires in the hearts of his alt-right supporters. When society begins to collapse, neo-fascist white supremacist militias pounce on the situation, ready to assert some of the “liberty” they believe they have been denied for so long. Wendig does a good job portraying the members of these groups as wannabe soldiers who are living out some long-held fantasy.

Given current events, however, these segments are more terrifying than thinking about any potential humanity-ending pandemic. Also, I don’t want to give much away, but at one point, a character involved in one of these militias goes from a Creepy Level of 8 to 1,000 in the span of a couple paragraphs.

The book follows the points of view of several characters throughout that give different perspectives. One is a sister to a sleepwalker. Another is a CDC scientist. There’s an evangelical pastor trying to make sense of what’s going on. There’s even a washed-up rock’n’roll star in the mix, as well as some others that I won’t divulge.

I really enjoyed this book. Sure, sometimes a couple of the characters were a little grating, but overall this book really goes places. Lots of interesting twists and revelations. I’m sure it will get comparisons to “The Stand” (which even gets a shout-out in the book), but it’s clearly not just another “The Stand”. In fact, I think I even might like this book more.

The first 99% was amazeballs.  The very end and epilogue chipped the diamond that is this story.



A creative take on the apocalypse, like something that might have happened before Stephen King's The Gunslinger, the world is burning and by-God, we started the fire... I seriously loved this book.

Until I didn't.

The ending took the story from a little quirky, creative, different, and crashed it into a mountain of groans and eye-rolling.  I get it, the story had to end somewhere, but life doesn't have endings, just new beginnings... Wendig actually blogged about this (using the ending of Game of Thrones as a starting point (link)).  I thought it would have been fitting to have an ending more like life... just moving on... I dunno, I don't want to say too many details and spoil it for someone else.  I think the ending was forced and didn't need to end with a solid stopping point.  There.  The other 750 pages was amazeballs, as said before.

The strength of this story is the characters.  The people are real, with hopes and dreams and sins, they may or may not learn from their mistakes, I'm 99% sure I went to school with a couple of these guys.  Overall, this book is worth it for the characters alone.

The only point of the characters I don't like is how the scientists acted early on... before the world went to hell, I got distracted by how some of them ignored evidence.  I'm a science teacher, not an actual scientist, but dear God, a character has a physical reaction to the flock from something being produced (radiation? signals? I don't know, let's just ignore that for right now, it can't possibly be important) and the main scientist not only ignores this but thinks later about how he shouldn't be ignoring it... I just lost so much respect for his character, go to Hell Benji.

Overall, highly recommend.  Now I need to go read more of Wendig's stuff.

**This ARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.**