A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A strange, ambitious, somewhat uneven but often excellent novel tracing a pandemic through an immense timeline via a series of linked short stories.

In the opening story, an archaeologist travels to the Arctic research base where his daughter Clara died falling through a sinkhole that revealed a 30,000 year-old-corpse. The ancient body, nicknamed Annie, is of a young girl with a bizarre genome, whose corpse carries a strange virus. As the anthropologist tries to understand Clara and what drove her to leave her own young daughter behind in her quest to save the world from climate change, the virus begins to spread...

Subsequent stories trace the pandemic and its effects on society through the lens of people grieving their own losses, working in new jobs that have arisen because of mass death and grief, trying to find a cure or escape the effects, or all of the above.

Despite the way that sounds, this doesn't feel at all like a typical science fiction pandemic book. It's a distinctly literary mainstream version of science fiction, with major surrealistic elements. You can tell the difference because a genre SF book would follow up on and explore elements like, say, Annie's genome:

Part Neanderthal and part something only superficially human, she possessed genetic traits similar to those of a starfish or an octopus.

I read that and thought, "Wow! Tell me more!" In fact, we get exactly one more sentence about it. This does eventually get followed up on, but not for ages and no one ever says, "WTF STARFISH OR OCTOPUS??!!"

In a later story, a scientist finds that a tiny singularity capable of powering a spaceship has opened up in his brain. This does get more detail as people are understandably concerned about what this might do to him and he wants to extract it from his brain to tap its spaceship-powering potential, but he only glancingly implies that it was the result of a lab "accident" born of depression after his daughter's death, and that's all we ever learn about the cause. We don't get anything more on the "accident," how the black hole was discovered, or anyone saying "WTF TINY BLACK HOLE IN YOUR BRAIN??!!"

In other stories, a man in a coma finds himself in what may or may not be an afterlife, with a strange task that slowly becomes clear; a man works as a costumed mascot at a theme park aimed at giving dying children a wonderful final day before they're euthanized on a roller coaster; a forensic pathologist befriends a dying man who's willed her his body; a man tries to repair robot dogs containing recordings of the voices of their dead owners; two women paint murals on the walls of a generation ship to commemorate the planets they visit and the people they've lost.

The stories are all told in first person, which makes them very immediate and gripping, but also has the unfortunate effect of making it very noticeable that the narrators all sound exactly the same. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them are straight, thirty-something Japanese-American men. (Everyone in the book is straight, not just the narrators, but a few narrators slightly break the mold by being Japanese or women or younger/older than average.)

However, a lot of the stories are very powerful. They're all about grief and many of them are about parent-child relationships. Most of the characters mean well, though some of them are fuckups, and most of the stories are about people searching for and often finding meaning and connection and love in the midst of devastation.

Though the stories are linked by connected characters a la six degrees of separation, and the book as a whole feels unexpectedly unified by the end, the stories vary widely in terms of how much I liked them. The first story is extremely strong and the rest range from excellent to okay. Of the okay ones, there's a set that are fine on their own but collectively feel repetitive. They're about the death and grief industry in a world where capitalism has taken over death and death has taken over capitalism and banks are deathbanks and money is deathcurrency and all the ads are death-related and the sheer muchness of both the death-and-capitalism ouroboros and the several stories focusing on that makes otherwise good stories feel one-note. Death note.

The final story is a banger that recontextualizes the entire book. I could have done without the cameos from real-life famous people but otherwise it's extremely well-done.

How High We Go in the Dark is a flawed and very weird book, and often hard to read due to both the subject matter and sheer intensity with which it's portrayed. But it's also very well-written, well-structured in a way that isn't immediately obvious, often extremely moving, and an unexpectedly quick read. It's an epic in just under 300 pages, which is impressive all by itself.

Sequoia Nagamatsu (what a great name) wrote the book before Covid, and had the distinctly surreal experience of trying to sell it in 2020.

Content Notes: Even apart from the entire book being death and grief central, the plague initially kills mostly children. So there's that. Also, one story is about animal experimentation and features an adorable and doomed intelligent pig.