‘The Dog Stars’ by Peter Heller

‘The Dog Stars’ by Peter Heller is a very good book set in Colorado after a world war or a plague or both, we’re never quite sure. The protagonist, Hig, is a pilot who lives in a compound with his aptly named buddy Bangley who is an armourer.
Hig flies around doing reconnaissance while Bangley takes care of the arsenal.
They have a dummy farmhouse to lure the baddies in with hopes of raping and pillaging the decent folk, and then Hig and Bangley give them their just deserts.
I really enjoyed the book and it also got high praise from my great friend, the late Ed Valerio, who was a military historian and a combat veteran.
‘The Dog Stars’ was recently made into a blockbuster movie by Riddley Scott, although as of this writing, it’s not busting too many blocks.
The movie is ok; not as good as the book. The big problem with the movie was the bad guys. The book had small groups of individualized Mad-Max type baddies who were killed one at a time or in small groups, like a Western. It’s much more satisfying to see a bad guy get his comeuppance if you recognize him as the guy with the pink mohawk who was tormenting the decent folk in the scene before.
In the book, Hig meets a marauder with a gross-looking necklace, who explains, “Dem are c*nts.” Now there’s a guy we can really enjoy seeing blown to smithereens with one of Bangley’s handy little grenades.
In the movie, the bad guys come in a blurry AI swarm and they all look like members of the Blue Man Group. Where’s the fun in that?
And Ed Valerio would tell you that a swarm of that size would be logistically impossible, like the Helvetii in Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
There’s also a complicated subplot about a bunch of cannibals at the Grand Junction airport who’ve constructed this weird casino-hotel facade — don’t ask me to explain — but it features Allison Janney and she’s always fun to watch, even as a pseudo 60s stewardess.
And Scott leaves out one of the little touches that made the book great. At the very end Hig sees a jet flying overhead and hears the pilot speaking Arabic.