When Peter Heller sat down to write his first novel, “The Dog Stars,” he didn’t intend to write a post-apocalypse story. But he wrote its first lines — “I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks” — with no plan, and that’s where they led him.
Hig, the fictional narrator and protagonist of “The Dog Stars,” navigates a world ravaged by a disease that has killed 99% of the human population. A movie adaptation of Heller’s novel hit theaters Friday, directed by Ridley Scott and featuring some big Hollywood names: the likes of Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce.
“It was that voice of Hig that kept me writing this, even though I didn’t want to write a post-apocalyptic book, because this guy had this irrepressible, bubbling sense of joy of life. It might be buried deep sometimes, but it was there,” Heller said.
The story takes place mostly on Colorado’s Front Range, at the Erie Municipal Airport, where Hig pilots a 1956 Cessna 182, the same type of plane Heller still keeps in a hangar there — also with the same color, the same tail number, and the same name: “the Beast.” Hig lives in a lonely world — fishing, hunting, flying — some favorite pastimes of Heller, who was an award-winning adventure writer and the author of four nonfiction books before he wrote “The Dog Stars.”
“My hangar is Hig’s hangar,” he said.
With Heller’s method — write now, think later — he ends up writing a few pages, or a chapter, before “bumping into what’s really on my heart,” he said. “When I start that first line, and go into the next and the next, there has to be a music or a cadence or a rhythm, a flow that I’m just in love with.”
Writing “The Dog Stars,” Heller said, was an experience that left him “more thrilled than at any point” in his life of outdoor adventure and expeditions.
“It’s my party. I can go anywhere I want,” he added. “Where would I transport? I would transport onto a mountain creek, my favorite creek, and I’d fish. Because as I’m writing along, I actually feel like I’m there, totally immersed. It’s like I’m reincarnated or something. In some way, I’m living another life.”
The landscapes and themes Heller explores through Hig’s story, while catastrophic, hold relevance in the real world.
In “The Dog Stars,” Heller paints a picture of Colorado’s forests burning, or pillaged by invasive beetles. The trout, Hig says, are all gone from the warming creeks.
“The story of our time is climate change, habitat loss, the destruction of the oceans with plastics and pollution, acidification, all that,” Heller said. “It hurts my feelings really badly, and that had to inform the novel as I wrote on. All of that ended up informing the book, but I didn’t mean it to, it wasn’t like I came in with an agenda.”
As Heller tells a story in which nature is succumbing to climate change, he also speaks to its role in feeding the human spirit.
“Even though in this book, the circumstances were so bleak, Hig found solace in nature,” Heller said. “He found solace in fishing, he found solace in going to the mountains to hunt, not for the killing, but for just being out in the woods, the smells, the wind in the trees, and the listening.”
Hig, played by Elordi in the film, lives at Erie’s airport with a reticent and grumpy companion named Bangley, played by Brolin. They spend their days surviving, protecting “the perimeter” from intruders, while Hig reminisces about his former life — a home near Denver’s Sloan’s Lake with a wife who was a schoolteacher before she died of the disease Heller only references as “the flu.”
Heller’s fictional epidemic might resonate with readers more now than it did when the book was published in 2012, prior to the COVID pandemic creating a collective understanding of what a world-stopping disaster could look like. Remembering the “before” in the “after” of such an event, with a nostalgia and newfound appreciation for what once was, is an undercurrent of Hig’s story.
From a King Soopers in Denver to the mesas of Grand Junction, Heller offers points of reference familiar to Coloradans, but bleaker than they exist today — abandoned, burned, left in tatters.
Throughout the story, Hig thinks back on the “before.”
“If they knew what was coming they wouldn’t have complicated everything so much,” he says in the story’s first chapter.
Heller recalls, in the earliest days of the COVID shutdown, when he was one of the only drivers on the highway as he made his way back from a fishing trip near Denver.
“Hair stood up on the back of my neck,” he said. “I felt like Hig. It was like life imitating art imitating life. It was uncanny.”
When he was called by screenwriter Mark Smith, who also wrote the screenplay for “The Revenant,” with interest in turning “The Dog Stars” into a film, Heller was elated.
“I had to put my jaw back in place,” he said. “One thing I loved about ‘The Revenant’ was that nature was the biggest character. … Human drama is thrown up against this vast, magnificent landscape. It’s sort of heedless and sort of pitiless, but beautiful.”
Scott’s adaptation of “The Dog Stars” was shot in Italy, not Colorado, and some other changes have been made from the novel. Elordi is at least 10 years younger than Hig, a character in his 40s in the book, for example, and Elordi is “better looking,” Heller added with a laugh. But he’s OK with that.
In the end, Heller said, the movie couldn’t be an exact representation of his 300-page novel. But for him, it does well to capture the essence of Hig and the heart of his story.
“They got the main thrust of it, which is this character in this world trying to stay connected,” Heller said. “That’s why I called it ‘The Dog Stars.’ He’s lost his entire world. He doesn’t have a book of all the stars, he doesn’t know all the right constellations. So he makes them up. … And it’s his way of staying connected to the things he loved in the past and recreating the world the way he has to now.”
On Friday, the day the film opened in theaters, Heller was sitting in his living room looking out on Sloan’s Lake. He had just returned from its London premiere.
“The third time watching was better than the second, which was better than the first,” he said. “I’m just so honored that another artist, a great artist, is inspired by my novel to create a discrete, new work of art.”
He planned to see it again Friday night, and again Saturday night, and again Sunday night, with his wife, Kim. And he hopes the spirit of the story reaches the audience: “It’s the bleakest of times, but I think it asks the question for all of us in our daily lives. How do we take the risk to love others and receive love? How do we keep our hearts open when times are really tough?”
“We have to keep our sense of humor, our sense of fun. We have to find joy where we can, and we have to take care of each other. All of those things make us more resilient,” Heller said.
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