The intricacies of the plot become clear after page 197, and while not complicated, the novel could be easily spoiled, so details will be sparse. In this apocalypse the human race engineers its own extinction and possible salvation. Wendig eschews these devices, filling humanity with its own devils, angels, zombies and general masters of destruction.
But those two works use fantasy elements like devil figures and reluctant saviors to weave their tales of mankind’s folly. Great apocalypse stories of the past used to rely on cultural anxieties like nuclear war and pandemics, and Wendig makes apparent influences like Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert R. Like the bottle thrown to create a riot a few pages later, that sentence catalyzes what follows, a mashup narrative about a very possible ending of the human race. “Trash like them had washing machines on their lawn and hate in their hearts.”įrom that exact moment, Wanderers becomes the Chuck Wendig book you thought you picked up. You look for a foothold, anything that will make you turn another page, and it comes with a sentence at the bottom of page 197. Given all that established good will, you can forgive a man a dud, which surmises your capsule review of the first quarter of Wanderers. He not only writes wonderful, terrifying novels, but communicates about writing so ferociously that to read a post on his Terrible Minds blog or to read his books on writing, Damn Fine Story and The Kick-Ass Writer, is to wade in inspiration. He introduces the first family to be affected, the disgraced doctor brought onto the case only he can solve by forces beyond his control, the pastor who cares for everyone’s problems except for those of his family, the mysterious leader of a White Supremacist militia, the former cop looking for a purpose, the rock god searching for redemption and several medical and computer geniuses.įor exactly 197 pages, Wendig wanders – pun intended – from storyline to storyline, planting seeds in familiar ground and testing the patience of his most ardent fans.
Given the 769-page length of Wanderers, Wendig chooses a more reserved tact, moving his stock characters into place for what reads like fairly standard apocalyptic fare. From his Miriam Black novels to his Star Wars series, he utilizes active verbs so visceral and sentences so clipped that he makes James Ellroy look like a Charles Dickens wannabe. For the uninitiated, the best word to describe Wendig’s prose styling is propulsive. One hundred and ninety-seven pages into Chuck Wendig’s hefty apocalyptic tome Wanderers you begin to wonder where the Chuck Wendig novel is hiding.
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