Wanderers: A Novel
by Chuck Wendig
It’s been a few months since I read this
book so the question is – what stuck with me? It was an interesting read, clearly
inspired by the concerns of our current day.
In Wanderers, the environment is going
downhill fast and there is a fair certainty that eventually it’s going to hit a
wall and people are going to die. It’s a fair bet that the next big epidemic is
going to take out a fair number of people. But where will it start and how will
it proceed?
It begins with the sleepwalkers. One day someone
just starts walking. One by one, others join them. If someone tries to detain
them, they explode. They seem to be bullet proof, or very nearly so. They are
accompanied by family members and friends who try to care for them without
impeding their progress. I liked how Wendig took this down to the personal
level, letting us meet these people and their caregivers instead of just
talking about the phenomenon. We start with one sleepwalker, her sister, and
their journey.
There is a philosophical argument at work
here about who deserves to be protected by the law, the people who are walking
or the people who live in the areas the walkers pass through? People are
reasonably worried that this is being caused by a disease that could spread.
Are they suffering this or causing it? Who do we protect?
It’s definitely a dark story. Men do evil
things out of fear and hate. Wendig doesn’t really flinch away from describing all
the gory details.
Even our hero, Benjamin Ray, is in a state
of disgrace as the story begins. He is a former scientist with the CDC. In a
moment of clarity or fear, he saw the horrible practices on a factory farm and
was sure that it would cause a “zoonotic leap” where the disease leaps from
animal to human. He manufactures evidence to shut them down. Like the boy who
cried wolf, it backfires and he ends up losing his job.
“Some moments he felt like, I did the right thing, and they punished me
for it. In the next moment, the opposite came to him with grave certainty: You lied to suit your agenda, and you
deserved worse than you got.”
At the same time, another plague has
reared its ugly head. It is fast moving but it spreads before people know they
have it. It roots into the brain like a fungus, giving the bearer a hideous
white crust around the mouth and upper respiratory distress. The death rate is
high and it causes people to act homicidal before they die. Where did it start
and how do they stop it?
But the CDC now has an AI computer that
anticipates plagues. It anticipated the sleepwalkers, the white mask plague,
and it wants Benji on the case. Why? Will the CDC let him?
It’s an ugly story, beautifully told,
brutal and pain filled. I couldn’t put it down, all 800 pages of it.
