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A review by flying_monkey
Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
I had held off reading this despite thinking that a previous book of his (Zer0es) was quite good, largely because from the description and reviews, it looked like a dozen books or films or TV series we've all done already. And it is very reminiscent of Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or older books like George R. Stewart's Earth Abides or Walter Tevis's Mockingbird, the one that everyone compares this to, Stephen King's The Stand, but particularly for me, Peng Shepherd's M, which is one of the very few books I have given up on because it just seemed to have no particular structure and the writing and character development wasn't good enough to hold the interest in the absence of structure. This is actually a big danger for (post-)apocalyptic novels. Often people (or what's left of them) just wander around a decaying landscape. The interest is largely either in the politics and sociology of the situation - how did we get here? (how) can we survive? - and the personal and psychological - are these people we care about, and does what they do make sense? Some, like Margaret Atwood (Oryx & Crake etc.) and Walter Miller (Canticles of Liebowitz) also layer on a grim humor or play with dark irony.
Wanderers has a novel twist on the genre, with the central idea that a bunch of people in the USA suddenly leave their homes and families and head out on the highway like sleepwalkers. But they are sleepwalkers who can't be woken or reasoned with, or stopped - the last in particular is a very bad a idea, because they literarally explode, something that features in some of the nastiest scenes in the book. The Center for Disease Control is called in, as is one particular disgraced ex-CDC expert, Dr Benji Ray, who gets hired by a mysterious company and finds himself working with a very powerful AI system which seems to know an awful lot about what's going on. There are tensions with pressure from the under-fire Democratic President Hunt, American's first female leader, to get this solved and therefore head off the challenge of the right-wing populist Republican, Creel. The pressure increase as at the same time there seems to be a new and dangerous plague emerging. Apart from Ray, the other central character is Shana, a young white woman whose little sister, Nessie, was the first 'walker', and who has emerged as the de-facto leader of a growing band of 'shepherds', families and friends who give up everything to stay with their loved ones, and form a growing convoy making its way who knows where...
Should be good, right?
Quite a bit of it is good. Like Stephen King (or many better popular novelists), Wendig can write fluidly but without having any discernable 'style'. And like Kings' The Stand, Wanderers is a big book. There are quite a few major characters in addition to the two central figures: a liberal preacher who gets caught up in the phenomenon and let's his desire to be listened to overwhelm his conscience; a vicious white supremacist militia leader (and his backwoods associates), a brain-injured ex-cop, a washed up rockstar with a messiah complex and a gay life hidden from his family; and many more. There is big (and perhaps sometimes rather too unsubtle) politics and sociology, and all the personal stuff too: love, violence, suspicion, sacrifice, betrayal. And it actually has a conclusion that's satisfying too: it's nice to read a novel that isn't 'the first part of a new sequence' for once.
However, a lot of the time the book reads more like it's a aiming to be a TV series rather than just being content to be a novel. Critics often talk about books being 'filmic' but this absolutely is 'televisual' in its feel. There are characters who are very Walking Dead. I also found myself reminded of Lost and Stranger Things as much the book's written fictional forebears. One of the problems with this is that some characters teeter on the edge of stereotype or diversity box-ticking, or are introduced and then don't do much, or just disappear into the background, almost like a TV series where a different writer has taken over - for example we get a really interesting young Asian-American CDC scientist who starts to play a big role and then is gone. And some just seem unnecessary or badly thought-out. The character of Pete Corley, the rockstar, is not only just annoying (he's supposed to be, although that doesn't help much), but there also seems to be no reason why he has anything to do with any of this in the first place. He is introduced breaking up with his band, and the next chapter he's turned up at the convoy of walkers and shepherds as if the author just wanted him to be there but couldn't be bothered to work out a reason why or how or anything else. His boyfriend, Landry, who is potentially much more interesting, remains a camp sketch of a character, the black gay man who has to hover in the background, and when he does reappear to play a bigger role, eventually goes the way of all black gay men in (even 'woke') white novels and movies... although, I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that lots of people die.
My overall impression of Wanderers is that it's a highly readable and thought-provoking book with a few significant flaws, which mean that I can't think it as excellent as many mainstream critics did (it featured in lots of 'best of the year' list). Alongside some of the character issues, the combination of pandemic and AI disaster novel doesn't always sit comfortably together and the final 'twist' I saw coming from from very early on (not that it's a novel that depends on that twist).
Wanderers has a novel twist on the genre, with the central idea that a bunch of people in the USA suddenly leave their homes and families and head out on the highway like sleepwalkers. But they are sleepwalkers who can't be woken or reasoned with, or stopped - the last in particular is a very bad a idea, because they literarally explode, something that features in some of the nastiest scenes in the book. The Center for Disease Control is called in, as is one particular disgraced ex-CDC expert, Dr Benji Ray, who gets hired by a mysterious company and finds himself working with a very powerful AI system which seems to know an awful lot about what's going on. There are tensions with pressure from the under-fire Democratic President Hunt, American's first female leader, to get this solved and therefore head off the challenge of the right-wing populist Republican, Creel. The pressure increase as at the same time there seems to be a new and dangerous plague emerging. Apart from Ray, the other central character is Shana, a young white woman whose little sister, Nessie, was the first 'walker', and who has emerged as the de-facto leader of a growing band of 'shepherds', families and friends who give up everything to stay with their loved ones, and form a growing convoy making its way who knows where...
Should be good, right?
Quite a bit of it is good. Like Stephen King (or many better popular novelists), Wendig can write fluidly but without having any discernable 'style'. And like Kings' The Stand, Wanderers is a big book. There are quite a few major characters in addition to the two central figures: a liberal preacher who gets caught up in the phenomenon and let's his desire to be listened to overwhelm his conscience; a vicious white supremacist militia leader (and his backwoods associates), a brain-injured ex-cop, a washed up rockstar with a messiah complex and a gay life hidden from his family; and many more. There is big (and perhaps sometimes rather too unsubtle) politics and sociology, and all the personal stuff too: love, violence, suspicion, sacrifice, betrayal. And it actually has a conclusion that's satisfying too: it's nice to read a novel that isn't 'the first part of a new sequence' for once.
However, a lot of the time the book reads more like it's a aiming to be a TV series rather than just being content to be a novel. Critics often talk about books being 'filmic' but this absolutely is 'televisual' in its feel. There are characters who are very Walking Dead. I also found myself reminded of Lost and Stranger Things as much the book's written fictional forebears. One of the problems with this is that some characters teeter on the edge of stereotype or diversity box-ticking, or are introduced and then don't do much, or just disappear into the background, almost like a TV series where a different writer has taken over - for example we get a really interesting young Asian-American CDC scientist who starts to play a big role and then is gone. And some just seem unnecessary or badly thought-out. The character of Pete Corley, the rockstar, is not only just annoying (he's supposed to be, although that doesn't help much), but there also seems to be no reason why he has anything to do with any of this in the first place. He is introduced breaking up with his band, and the next chapter he's turned up at the convoy of walkers and shepherds as if the author just wanted him to be there but couldn't be bothered to work out a reason why or how or anything else. His boyfriend, Landry, who is potentially much more interesting, remains a camp sketch of a character, the black gay man who has to hover in the background, and when he does reappear to play a bigger role, eventually goes the way of all black gay men in (even 'woke') white novels and movies... although, I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that lots of people die.
My overall impression of Wanderers is that it's a highly readable and thought-provoking book with a few significant flaws, which mean that I can't think it as excellent as many mainstream critics did (it featured in lots of 'best of the year' list). Alongside some of the character issues, the combination of pandemic and AI disaster novel doesn't always sit comfortably together and the final 'twist' I saw coming from from very early on (not that it's a novel that depends on that twist).