BINGO – New
This is going to be a difficult book to summarize because I would not consider it a novel. It’s closer to a collection of short stories, but that’s not quite right either. It’s something in between. There’s a long form improv format in which the audience sees a scene with Person A and Person B. Something in that scene sparks an idea for a scene tangentially connected between Person B and Person C. Then a connected scene between Person C and D, on and on until ultimately Person A comes back for the final scene with the final new actor in the second to last scene. How High We Go In the Dark is like that: a series of connected stories all within the same universe that are tangentially connected.
Things kick off with a scientist completing the work of his daughter who passed away on the job in Serbia. Their work releases a virus that wipes out huge swaths of the population. The rest of the book is about how the world copes with and is affected by this pandemic coupled with severe climate change. This book is very, very sad. There were multiple moments that I had to stop what I was doing and collect myself because author Sequoia Nagamatsu so eloquently described the experience of grief and the ways that we experience that emotion. That grief permeates the entire book. Yet through the grief, there is also hope if you look for it. Nagamatsu sprinkles hope throughout, but you really have to earn it. You have to choose to see it. But it’s there. And it’s beautiful to behold.
This is a truly stunning work, no matter how it’s categorized. It’s going to stick with me for a very long time. This is a phenomenal first outing for Nagamatsu. How High We Go in the Dark is his first novel, but his experience writing short stories shines.