Here's some pandemic fic I actually enjoyed!! Nagamatsu imagines a world where an ancient virus is revived from melting Arctic ice, causing a global pandemic that will forever change how we, as a species, interact with death. In the vein of Cloud Atlas, the intermixed chapters all involve characters somehow related to each other, but with different plotlines. The book progresses forward in time from ~2020s to the 2110s (with two chapters involving much different time scales). I get why some reviewers call this a short story collection, but I think the connections between chapters are strong enough categorize this as a novel.

I thought it was super interesting how death culture and economy emerged as a result of all the loss. I liked the the first half of the book more than the second half, which had too many unrequited love chapters that I wasn't as into. Almost all the chapters were sad, but it's ultimately this book about grief and loss, so...

My favorite chapters were: 30,000 Years Beneath a Eulogy, City of Laughter, Through the Garden of Memory (very unique!), Pig Son, and A Gallery A Century, A Cry A Millennium.

<spoiler>I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about the ending. I almost feel like the *twist* cheapened how I felt about characters that were revealed to be this alien individual. IMO, it also really shifted the tone of this from a more lit-fic vibe to sci-fi, which I didn't appreciate 90% through the book.</spoiler>

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and William Morrow in exchange for an honest review.

Strap in for highs and lows with the pandemic novel 'How High We Go in the Dark'

How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut novel about a climate change virus in 2030 that alters humanity centuries into the future, could hit all too hard for those grieving the loss of loved ones to coronavirus, as well as the loss of their former lives pre-pandemic.

The book has drawn comparisons to Emily St. John Mandel's pandemic tale Station Eleven, but at least the latter is mostly about a performance troupe thriving in the hopeful post-apocalypse. Nagamatsu's collection of interlinked stories unflinchingly inhabits the ripple effects of a 30,000-year-old Arctic plague, released from melting permafrost: an aimless young man works at a euthanasia theme park for terminally ill kids, placing them on the roller coaster that will kill them before the plague does; a test subject pig gains sentience, only to realize its true purpose as an organ donor; people connect in VR online chat rooms to make suicide pacts. Make no mistake, this is a book about death.

But it's not a singular nor reductive depiction of death. It's the cynicism of how death gives way to flourishing commerce — hotels where clients can stage macabre final moments with their loved ones' corpses for closure, bitcoin whose value rises and falls with death tolls, social media profiles that allow digital ghosts to live past their failed flesh-and-blood bodies.

This is balanced by thoughtful explorations of how the survivors process death and loss through art — a muralist decorates every inch of a generation ship's walls with portraits of those lost to the plague; an artisan forgoes cremation in favor of liquidation, transforming bodies into dynamic ice sculptures. Even the bleakest stories conjure up a memorable image, and often that visual involves reaching upward: to the stars, to a memory, or even just stretching your arms skyward at the roller coaster's peak, whether or not you know how the ride ends.

Nagamatsu (Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone) has been working on this ambitious book in one form or another since 2011, with his initial story drafts focusing more on familial estrangement and grief. Tracing the lifespan of the Arctic plague via interrelated vignettes certainly gives How High a very A Visit from the Goon Squad vibe, but it's vital to crack the surface of its timely narrative context and focus more on the emotional underpinnings. Like Jennifer Egan's novel, it deserves to be read in order, as the connections between various lives over the subsequent generations are often subtle, from a minor character in one story undergoing a career change in the next, to a few potential forays into alternate universes.

The novel's title comes from one of the weaker stories, "Through the Garden of Memory," which follows a comatose plague patient into a liminal space where he interacts with other victims who he can at first sense only by voice and touch in the semi-darkness. Eventually they gain the ability to witness each other's lives leading up to their shared infection, and work against their self-preservation instincts to build a human pyramid toward — well, it's not exactly up, but certainly some way out of this void. Perhaps it's the anything-goes rules of this dream state, but this more out-there story lacks the affecting specificity of the accounts that precede and follow it.

By contrast, a story like "The Used-To-Be Party" is so achingly poignant because of its hyper-specific and relatable form: a social media posting from a lonely man to the neighbors that his late wife knew intimately but to whom he is virtually a stranger. His invitation to a block party for those spared (but also not) by the plague pulses with mingled grief and hope, but also carries the sentiment repeated by many of the novel's characters: I should have been the one who died. It doesn't take a pandemic to tap into that survivor's guilt, but it does make the feeling that much more universal.

As thoughtfully as the author depicts the way humans cope with fear and grief during the plague, the final section of the book seems to brush them aside to tell a larger, cosmic tale. The story was compelling without it.

If you regard How High We Go in the Dark as an emotional roller coaster, then you might agree that it peaks narratively about two-thirds through the collection, with those daring stories providing the reading equivalent of a slow ramp-up and stomach-dropping plunge. That necessarily means that subsequent stories may fail to elicit the same thrill. Yet, the ride needs its downs to balance its ups in order for the reader to feel as if they've experienced the complete arc, as if they've gotten their money's worth, as if they can get off the ride and decide whether to get back on again.

How High We Go In The Dark was a fascinating, cleverly meandering tale that has the feel of interconnected short stories Many of these links are made through vague or seemingly unimportant interactions leaving me to pondering how many times I missed a puzzle piece that would have fit neatly into the larger confusion had I been paying better attention. While this elegant weaving was initially disorienting, the end result was satisfying as the patterns became more apparent.

The pseudo-isolated stories share the common thread of a terrible virus sweeping the globe that has horrifying effects on children. Though as the story progresses, the virus mutates again, and again, leaving the world scrambling to adapt each time. Especially in the beginning, How High We Go In The Dark was slightly triggering after the past two years we’ve experienced, though the Arctic virus is much more damaging and deadly. The stories Nagamatsu somehow manages to overlap are highly ambitious as each one takes on a life of its own before the next one picks up. Initially I found myself curious and slightly disappointed when I realized that stories would not be revisited, until I started recognizing familiar characters showing up in the periphery of the other stories. At that point it became a game to see how fast I could make the connections on my own. These links were sometimes so fague that I started to search names in each story on my ebook to see if that name was one we had encountered before, usually with the answer in the affirmative.

I can’t emphasize enough how ambitious How High We Go In The Dark is with the stories spanning a variety of settings and professions, ranging from a research site in Siberia, a euthenasia rollercoaster, far off planets, various science laboratories, the inner workings of a death hotel, a tinkering robot mechanic, the role of virtual reality, group connected consciousness, evolving community relationships, and I’m not even remotely coming close to spanning the wide array of topics covered by Nagamatsu. Each chapter which served as its own short story drew the reader in and invested them before moving on to a new topic. Nagamatsu somehow managed to write engaging short stories where the characters and their lives felt real, regardless of how crazy their situations might have seemed, and turned it into a cohesive novel. This formatting made it easy to put down this book in between chapters, with the flow being disjointed, but the curiosity as to where the story was headed made the breaks short.

Overall, this was one of the best plague, pandemic books I’ve read in a long time, with these seemingly independent stories overlapping in the most intricate of ways, leaving a reread in my future to see what connections I might have missed the first time around.

Short stories meld together to create a dystopian world that I wouldn't want to live in. A lot of dark scenes that combine to an even bleaker future. I did enjoy the writing and the book, but caution going into this book because it does deal with some heavy issues that could be our society one day.

In his debut novel, Sequoia Nagamatsu looks back from the future onto the defeats we are about to suffer. The 14 connected stories of How High We Go in the Dark poignantly recount the personal sorrows ensuing from our misuse of the planet. We’re too busy fighting the last war to notice we’re losing the next one.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/memories-of-the-future-apocalypse/

Author Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the short story collection Where We Go When All We Were is Gone (2016). He has also received notoriety for his short stories, some of which were published in The Iowa Review, Joyland, and Tin House. In his latest work, How High We Go in the Dark, he manages to capture the range of emotions, often difficult to express, that people all over the world have experienced during the pandemic.

How High We Go in the Dark jumps off immediately as an allegory for the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. In 2030, an Arctic virus is unleashed, infecting and killing the human population at rapid speed, wildfires are destroying the West coast, and cryptocurrency has become the most popular form of payment. The first chapter of the book is about a grieving archeologist who decides to continue his late daughter's work studying permafrost in the Artic. His daughter and her team discovered a 30,000 year-old body of a prehistoric girl in permafrost that is melting at an alarming rate, prompting a study that is continued by the main character. What transpires next sets the reader up for a journey through stories about grief, human connection, and survival in a world experiencing mass loss.

The reader is treated to 15 different, yet intertwined stories, that introduce them to a variety of characters who often make you feel great sympathy for them. From one character's routine job at a euthanasia park for children to a scientist's attachment to an intelligent pig from his laboratory to a young man working at an end-of-life hotel, the audience is taken on a journey that touches on the human need for compassion while dealing with collective grief and uncertainty.

How High We Go in the Dark is a sci-fi book, but Nagamatsu’s skillful storytelling makes it palatable for fans of different genres.

Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut novel, How High We Go in the Dark, blends science fiction apocalypse with our humanity. I had forgotten how good it feels to read an author of this caliber. These interconnected stories have a "hope in the dark" feel. Something that is sorely needed right now.

It is hope and sacrifice that drive these stories. A theme park for children who are terminally ill. A young comedian with little prospects entertains young children before they are euthanized. Pigs grown for organ transplants become sentient and end up having more heart for humanity than humans. An entire funeral industry grows out of the pandemic creating its kind of cryptocurrency and economy.

It is a novel, but it reads very much like a collection of short stories. Characters are interconnected and each story moves forward in time until a final twist in the end. The main themes are the sacrifices we make for the greater good. This is a pandemic novel. It might seem tiresome at the surface. Who needs to read something that we are all experiencing? There seem to be three kinds of these novels. The before eerily prescient novels, the cruel current ones that lack imagination, and the reflective hopeful ones like this. All things pass and we push forward into the future guided by hope.

Favorite Passages:

“She curled into me, and I thought about all the nights these past nine months that ended just like this one—never acknowledging the future, desperately wanting to forget the past—taking small comfort in the equilibrium that we both knew couldn’t last forever.”

“Because money was never the reason and, honestly, I would have done it for free if they hadn’t insisted. It made me feel good, for whatever that’s worth. They burned incense and held each other and cried while gazing at photos of their relatives. I bowed my head in respect. Once upon a time this was how we dealt with death. But something snapped in us when the dead could no longer be contained, when people didn’t really get to say goodbye. Cryogenic suspension companies proliferated, death hotels, services that preserved and posed your loved ones in fun positions, travel companies that promised a “natural” getaway with your recently departed. I remember Mr. Fang giving us a checklist upon hire that reminded us to always exude customer service, to never upset the guests, to remember that we were a hotel first and foremost, a funeral home second.”

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.

Beautifully bleak and beautifully hopeful. What a unique and special book about the unfolding of a global pandemic. In a sea of plague books recently, this one stands out. I received a copy from netgalley and I loved it.

Have you ever wondered how for granted we take lives we are granted?

In a great scheme of things, we just go with a flow and when presented with a challenge as a humanity, we take a stand and try our best to survive.

I have no words to describe how this book made me feel. Sequoia Nagamatsu took humanity under a magnifying glass and gave us an alternative story of what would happen if those melting glaciers would contain the human-killing virus and people would try their hardest to try to adapt. We are bombarded with enchanting short stories presenting the situation from different points of view at different points in time. We have their stories about euthanasia rollercoasters, hotels for the dead, or even a talking animal. The author brings all pieces together with beautiful writing and a reflection of how emotionally we could potentially evolve.

I was intrigued from the first couple of pages, and the mood of fighting the destiny was right in point for the beginning of February.

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.

A wildly imaginative book that takes our worst fears, stoked by the global pandemic and climate change, and shows them back to us in a kaleidoscope of heartbreaking and whimsical stories that take place in both the near and distant future. Nagamatsu's imagination is unparalleled and he brings to life a panoply of characters, interwoven by how their lives are touched by the tide of history. The first, second, and concluding story alone were worth the read, though some of the intervening tales could have been cut to reach the same effect. This book gave me both anxiety and hope for the future and made me wonder about my place in the cosmos.

Beautiful, human, heart wrenching. This is a tough read on so many levels. Go in prepared to be affected. I loved it, but check content warnings. The writing is stunning.

I started reading this and thought it seemed like a series of short stories and when I reached the end I found that’s exactly what it was. That wasn’t a bad thing. While I sometimes wanted to know more about a certain character, I enjoyed figuring out how the stories and characters fit together.

We have now entered into the time of the pandemic novel. I think that all the authors who got inspired by the advent of Coronavirus have finished their books and now I’m seeing more and more of them on Netgalley.

I’m ok with that. I know for some people it’s a subject still hitting a little too close to home, but call me a sadist, I enjoy these books.

I have to make an exception for this one. Don’t get me wrong, it is well written and evocative and has a major plot twist in the final quarter that is a real surprise. I should have enjoyed this book more than I did, but I also found it depressing, joyless and relentlessly sad. Don’t read this book unless you are in a good headspace for it. I also found some of the ways that society adapts to the illness a bit farfetched and unbelievable.

There are also a TON of favorable reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, so maybe it’s just me. I just had a hard time with it.

In the near future, a mysterious ancient body is discovered in the melting ice of the Arctic, and is ultimately the source of a deadly worldwide plague. A novel told in interconnected stories, How High We Go in the Dark begins with this conceit and branches out to paint an ambitious portrait of the virus, its aftermath, and its effect on people across the globe. It takes readers to euthanasia theme parks, to a cavernous space filled with memories, to labs and hospitals, into dozens of ordinary homes with ordinary families, and on a spaceship traversing galaxies, exploring the ways humans cope with loss, grief, survival, and the meaning of life. It's inspired in its creation and far-reaching in its scope, and I wanted to love it. Unfortunately, the book as a whole fell a bit short for me.

What I struggled with while reading is that the stories, most of them written in the first-person, all sound like they are narrated by the same person. I couldn't find a lot of differentiation in the various narrators, so the characters all felt a bit too similar, and that made them dull. And while Sequoia Nagamatsu takes the reader to lots of different locations within the stories, telling the story of the pandemic from multiple angles, I felt like he just explored many of the same themes over and over: estranged familial relationships, unrequited love. It became repetitive, and thus less impactful for me.

Although the stories are connected, some of those connections are very loose, with some characters garnering only a brief mention in one story before being a larger part of a story three chapters later. It was sometimes difficult for me to remember those bit characters, and I didn't always find the connections meaningful. And while the final story's attempt to tie everything together was creative, it felt like just a step too far into unreality for me.

How High We Go in the Dark is a compassionate, thought-provoking look at both our own pandemic reality and the universality and timelessness of grief, the way humanity deals with life in the blunt face of death. It offers a fascinating and cautionary vision of the future, in which every aspect of dying is monetized and humans struggle to connect in an increasingly digitized world, a future where global warming has changed life in myriad ways, large and small. It is a devastating and bleak reading experience, but it's also a worthwhile one. It didn't always affect me the way I wanted it to, but I appreciate Nagamatsu's purpose for writing it so, so much.

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book -- thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for my digital copy.

This started with 30,000 Years Beneath a Eulogy.
I thought that was a weird ass chapter title but I was eager to read this book.
About 4 chapters in at Pig Son, I realized that Nagamatsu probably watches Black Mirror just as much as I do, which is a good thing. But my brain is still thinking about the folks in Siberia from chapter 1 and wondering what the hell some flowers and rocks in a small child’s mouth have to do with anything. I am the person who gets anxious and tries to guess the ending the entire time I’m reading.
I had no idea that this would be various stories about the same event told from various character perspectives throughout different times. That took nothing away from the book itself, I just wasn’t prepared for this kind of read.
I like the idea of stories being told this way, especially now during a global pandemic. Some of the stories were mundane but they helped to show how people had to adjust to their new normal. Then other stories were heavier dealing more with loss-whether it was death or bonds with others. In both kinds of stories, the author did a great job of showing how we as humanity persevere, how we cope, or don’t cope, and how life goes on even during the darkest of times.
I think that this is a great read for this day and time. Even though it’s science fiction, the parallels to our current reality and global crisis are striking. I truly enjoyed this book and didn’t want to put it down!

Reading this in early 2022 while we're still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic was both depressing and enlightening, which is why it's such a memorable read. In "How High We Go in the Dark", Nagamatsu paints a picture of a world that is overtaken by the Arctic Plague, a dormant virus that a group of scientists unknowingly unleash while they continue their expeditions in the Arctic Circle. What follows in the next decade is a completely new society and way of life - with some shockingly close similarities to things that we've already experienced.

Each chapter is told from the perspective of a new narrator and his or her experiences after the pandemic as taken over; there's a amusement park employee, in charge of the rides that eventually bring children to their inevitable deaths; a scientist who creates a pig who can speak in the midst of his research for a cure; an engineer who fixes broken robotic dogs; individuals who are chosen for a starship that will launch them into space in search of other hospitable planets; a lonely man who makes an unforgettable connection through the world of VR cafes... Each story is striking and singular, but are all loosely connected across people or locations that overlap between them. Grief, trauma, and loss are captured in different lenses across each story - emotions and situations that many of us are familiar with, especially over the last few years.

Nagamatsu's prose is clearly structured and flows through each passage and storyline, and he's able to craft such distinct and complex characters in each chapter. While I don't usually enjoy short stories, I appreciated how intertwined these all were and how universal the themes and messages were across them all.

The comparisons to David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" are deserved, not only for the general plot -- a devastating pandemic unrolling over many years and its impact on culture and society -- but for the lyrical prose and the emotional impact it has upon the reader. The characters link together in surprising ways, but what will stick with me for a long time is the concept of an amusement park and roller coaster being a child's last life experience.

🌙 Book Review🌙
How High We Go in the Dark
By Sequoia Nagamatsu

This was an e-arc provided by NetGalley.
Publisher: William Morrow
Media: E-Book and Audio
Narrator: Multiple (Julia Whelan)
Publish Date: 01/18/22

Trigger warnings: child euthanasia, suicide, cancer, grief, and probably more that I’m not thinking of.

Synopsis: How High We Go in the Dark is an epic story that takes place over the span of thousands of years. This story details the human race’s struggles with a plague released after a discovery is made that has resulted from climate change. Taking place from various points of view, the reader is able to explore the various stages of the plague as it is released and how subsequently it is dealt with. Devastating and brutal, but brilliantly written, this is the story of human struggle and resilience.

Review:
Things I liked -
🌟 The plot was absolutely brilliant. The idea of a plague being released in the Arctic was very realistic and watching how the human race adapted to the plague was terrifying.
🌟The writing was fantastic.
🌟I loved the interconnectedness of each story and how that interconnectedness moved the story along.
🌟 I enjoyed many of the conversations within this book on grief and human connection.
🌟 The audiobook was narrated well.

Things I didn’t like-
✨ There were several trigger warnings that had I known of, I probably wouldn’t have picked this book up.
✨ The pacing was very slow and at times made me want to put it down to DNF.
✨ The book was broken up into short stories from the pandemic, which was interesting but I was unable to really gain any connection with the characters in an impactful way.
✨ The tone of the book overall was extremely depressing and had very little reprieve from that feeling. This aspect made me dread reading it at times.
✨The ending made sense but was still very odd and left me scratching my head.

Overall, I had really high hopes for this book and found myself exceptionally let down. The writing was beautiful, but the story felt disjointed. Although the concept of the book was great, there were very few stories that were actually memorable. The overall tone made me want to DNF this book a number of times, but I kept going because I had hoped the ending would be worth it but was sadly mistaken. The ending just wasn’t worth the time spent.

Rating: 🌟🌟💫 (2.5/5)
I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. The extra half star was because I appreciated having read it, even if it wasn’t for me.