Reviewing "How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu - How Dark Indeed?

Probably nothing to worry about ninety-nine percent of the time.

Yeah, ninety-nine percent secure. What could possibly go wrong handling an extinct virus, right?

The quotation above could have been a sentence that sealed the fate of real life Earth in 2019 just before that cursed lung infection took us by storm. The madness that ensued has now, almost three years later, become almost normal, almost a part of our lives.

And things have changed... Our language has been undergoing massive changes with tons of new terms and names for things we didn't know existed. Certain industries flourished during lockdowns while others quickly became obsolete and died. Working conditions have been revolutionized. The value we attribute to certain objects has been radically altered. We witnessed mass dying - certain age and health groups have suffered enormous losses, faced a lonely death in cold hospital rooms and many of us have lost loved ones we could not say goodbye to.

We have changed a lot.

So it's evident that during the hardest of times people have found in fiction a chance to escape the harsh reality and wanted to hear nothing whatsoever that reminded them of the ongoing pandemic. Admittedly, that's what I did too for the longest of times but somewhere along the way I started to wonder if and when we will be over the first jolt and start processing these weird times in literature and art.

Here we are now with my first pandemic book which, interestingly enough, was submitted during the early months of the pandemic and that in turn means it was written before COVID19 became a thing. This fact considered, Nagamatsu's foresight and understanding of human psyche under dire conditions since, that is of our very Zeitgeist so aptly and eclectically captured and explored, is nothing short of impressive.

How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of fourteen short stories that are sometimes loosely sometimes closely interconnected and span within a time frame that ranges from 2033, in which a deadly virus was released by the melting ice caps of the Arctic, to interstellar travel and ultimately to infinity. While the frame story is highly sfnal, that frame is filled out with in parts gut-wrenchingly tragic and partly pleasantly emotional or even trivial, but always intimate life stories of people whose lives have undergone a radical change. Nagamatsu braids microcosm into macrocosm, individual stories into the fate of humanity from pandemic to interstellar travel to planetary creation.

Let's take a look at my highlights among these stories.

30,000 Years Beneath A Eulogy

It all begins in Siberia, in the Batagaika Crater... Cliff, a father grieving the death of his daughter, visits the place she has spent the last days of her life: an excavation site where Arctic archaeologists examine artifacts and bodies that resurfaced from underneath ice caps that massively melted with the rise of temperatures.

We see the excursion through the eyes of Cliff, a scientist himself, who wants to finish the work his daughter started. Of great interest to him is the body of a little girl, named Annie for the enigmatic Eurythmics singer. She carries a virus which will later be baptized the "shapeshifter virus"; a virus which randomly modifies the function of the organ it infests into the functions of other organs (lungs into liver, brain into heart tissue etc.) ultimately leading them to fail. Little does he know that the experiments the staff carries on rats with the virus will trigger one of the biggest pandemics to change the world.

City of Laughter 

I watched the constellation of scars and welts on his chest rise and fall as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

Some years later the Arctic plague is in full swing and its primary targets are, shatteringly, children. This helps to avoid economic detriment since the victims aren't individuals that contribute to the fiscal system, but has a devastating impact on social and psychological levels. One of the consequences is the creation of so called Euthenesia Parks, former penitentiaries turned into theme parks where children come to at least die laughing and having a good time. Former class clown Skip is working in one of these parks and we follow him meeting, looking after, caring for, entertaining and finally killing young Fitch in this morbid paradise.

You guessed it, this is a soul-crusher, tear-jerker kind of story which will kick you to the ground and roll all over you while you're ugly crying. It is tragic and depressive, yes. But so is life sometimes.

Through the Garden of Memory

I awake in darkness.

This short story plays with a very compelling idea that has been dancing in my mind for some years now - what if all people who fall into a coma actually go somewhere and meet in one mental space?

An emotional account of people who touched and left their marks on our lives. Of all the other works in this book, this one reads like an especially personal relation of the author, an emotional closure with parents.

Pig Son

Dakhtar!

Another tormenting, heartbreaking piece of writing. If you, like me too, hate what we as the human race are doing to animals, Pig Son might just shake your core.

As the plague advances, the affected kids need organ transplants due to the high percentage of organ failure. A Sisyphean task, since the virus will attack the new organs too, requiring new organ transplants over and over again. And since we know how the human mind works, we all know where those organs will come from; animals, pigs to be precise. A medical expert tasked with the supervision of the growing of suitable animals for organ donation accidentally gives way to a miracle in which one of his subjects acquires the ability to speak the English language and starts communicating with the team which is supposed to later harvest its organs. The pig is baptized Snortorius PIG, his favorite time of the day is story time before going to bed and he likes Tolkien especially. Before Snortorius is told his purpose in life, the team plans a pig-napping to give him one last good day.

Do I need to say more? This was most certainly one of the saddest things I have read and I died reading this story.

Songs of Our Decay

Laird is dying from the Arctic plague and he wants to donate his body to science for further research. He falls in love with the forensic doctor accompanying him in his dying process who will process his body after his death. They have a shared love for "oldies" - pop, rock and punk songs from the 80s and 90s and go through a personalized alphabetical playlist whenever they meet.

Again - sad, sad, sad! But beautiful too. I wonder what it says about me that my favorites in this collection are all harrowing tragedies... What can I say? Apparently I am a succer for drama... If you are looking for a cheery read to lift you up, look somewhere else.

Once you have the hang of this melancholy universe marked by death, sorrow and nostalgia, Nagamatsu takes you to unexpected realms, where tiny black holes in one man's brain provide the necessary technological basis for interstellar travel and interstellar travelers set off to find a new world, all the while life on Earth keeps flowing and everything ending with a narration of the very unusual sort to tie all loose ends together.

I feel a little obsessed and also elated and touched by this book. As impressive as a debut this is, there are yet minor blemishes here and there; a number of fantastic ideas that are only touched upon on surface level and would have deserved a deeper exploration, a lack of fervid or imposing prose and finally a sense of disjointment between the last story and the rest of the book. Notwithstanding these minor, highly personal points, I have absolutely nothing to whine about and would gladly place this book among my best of the year list, which I surely will.