Review of Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

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.