How High We Go in the Dark

I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.

It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.

It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background characters narrate their own chapters added quite a bit of emotional nuance. Pig Son especially would have hit differently without the background from a few chapters earlier. Some of the stories were quite full of knives, but my one complaint is that some stories in the back half felt like retreading similar grounds of grief and remembrance; they just didn't have the same level of impact for me. Both the final chapter and the title-generating chapter were thematically strong, but didn't quite carry the same level of emotional weight or closure that I wanted. I am not sure subjectively why I felt this way, but I think this is some of the flipside of its short story nature--that there's only a consistent emotional thread running through the book rather than a character or plot arc.

I'm really glad to have read this, and feel like a lot of these stories and feelings are going to stick with me for a long while.

A series of bleak, gritty glimpses of what's in store for us over the next few decades.

The tone is lightened a bit here and there with injections of optimism, but I think it works against itself a little when the optimism feels unwarranted.

The way that the characters from the different stories are linked reminds me a bit of Cloud Atlas (although I only saw the movie (sorry)).

#SFFBookClub

Sequoia Nagamatsu's (@SequoiaN) How High We Go in the Dark is a dark, haunting, and insightful pandemic novel of short stories that rotate the protagonist role through an ensemble of characters. Each short story is a beautiful piece of literary speculative fiction that helps the reader to digest the grief and horror of the pandemic and find something to build hope upon.

When I reached the story about the euthanasia theme park for terminally-ill children, I was ready to put it down, but some of his metaphors started to land and drove me through the rest of the book.