Wanderers - Chuck Wendig

I’ve found myself these last few months being more and more drawn to dystopian pandemic books than I have in a long time, and I’ve read several of them. One of the best of them - and at almost 800 pages, by far the longest - is Chuck Wendig’s 2019 novel Wanderers. Too, despite its science fiction elements, it is also probably the scariest of the ones I’ve read since the beginning of our own real-world pandemic because of how by the time anyone figures out that something very wrong is happening to people, it is already too late to stop the spread. Way too late.

It all starts one morning when Shana wakes up to find that her little sister is nowhere in the house, and spots her walking toward the highway leading away from their isolated Indiana farm. At first, the little girl appears to be sleepwalking, but as Shana soon learns this is no ordinary sleep-walk. There is no way to wake her up, turn her around, or even minutely change the direction in which she’s walking. And soon enough, she is not alone. Other “sleepwalkers” will join her, so many of them, in fact, that the media come to call them “the flock,” just as they begin to call those who follow the flock to care for them, as Shana does, “the shepherds.” 

But where is the flock heading, and how is it possible that they can continue walking west (all the while gathering new members) from Indiana for weeks without stopping to rest, eat or drink anything, or communicate with anyone around them? Maybe they really are a flock, but no one can figure out what they have in common other than their ability to endlessly sleepwalk toward some unknown destination for an equally unknown purpose. And then people begin to die…and with a push from a radicalized radio preacher, the flock starts to get blamed for their deaths.

Bottom Line: Wanderers is a long book, but Chuck Wendig does not waste many pages in this accounting of how quickly the civilized world is capable of losing its civility and its soul. What Wendig has to say about humanity and the ties that bind us is sometimes horrifying, sometimes inspirational. This is a book that perhaps owes a tip-of-the-cap to Stephen King’s The Stand, but in my estimation, it is the better book of the two.

Chuck Wendig

(This review is a bit shorter than I like them, but I'm rushing this morning. I finished the book two days ago, but this is my first opportunity to write and post a review. The rolling blackout that is affecting the entire state of Texas this week has not spared us here. We regained power only 90 minutes ago, after having had power shut down for exactly, to the very minute, 17 hours. That means that it got down to 49 degrees in our bedroom last night, and that we are now having to boil water before using it - and that's hard to do without power. So we have all of our charging stations plugged in right now so that we will be ready for the next round, the heaters are working hard to get us back to a temperature in the neighborhood of seventy degrees, and we are boiling pots of water for later use. My daughters live about six miles from us, and both were down for five hours last night before the lights came back on for them around two a.m. They are down again, so it's obvious that we are nowhere near the end of the "rolling" yet.)