Heller writes with an authority born of experience. It starts at a meandering pace and quickly picks up speed.
The way Heller tells the story-it’s not a straightforward A to B journey there are turns and backtracking and changes of pace-reflects the river itself.
It feels intimate and reminded me of Tim O’Brien’s work in its limited scope. I read it in a couple of sessions, squeezing it into my schedule as often as possible. “The River” is streamlined, coming in at around 250 pages. Heller writes about guys doing stuff-surviving after a worldwide calamity communing with nature and killing a bad guy (unintentionally he had it coming!) navigating a dangerous river and saving a woman in distress-so I’m in. When he published “The Painter,” I read it immediately and it didn’t disappoint.
Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.Īs a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I devoured “The Dog Stars” and then started gifting copies to my reader friends. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddles and picking blueberries and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip-a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence
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