How High We Go in the Dark (2022) by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Book Review

How High We Go in the Dark (2022)

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

  This debut novel by American author Sequoia Nagamatsu has achieved middling to good reviews and is a genuine sales success- the Amazon listing has 380 reviews, which is good for a first-time novelist writing at the intersection of literary fiction and genre (science fiction).  On that particular spectrum (literary fiction/science fiction) this book leans heavily towards the former.  It is specifically marketed as a novel, but it is also a series of interlinked short stories, separated in chronological time during a world ending plague and the lengthy aftermath.  The characters overlap from story to story and he does deliver an ending that ties everything together in a way you would expect from a novel, but there is no denying that this is a book of interlinked short stories, not a novel in the sense of a single narrative with a fixed cast of characters.  It's not a problem for me, I'm just saying that, formally speaking, that structure makes this book more literary fiction than science fiction.

   Nagamatsu's apocalypse is pretty low key- capitalism survives even if wide swathes of the population do not, and the story arc isn't the conventional one of every human dying (or a cure being discovered and life returning to the pre disease status quo)- Nagamatsu follows a different path, with a much longer timeline enabled by the linked short story structure.   As far as individual stories go, some were very conventional literary fiction and others pair that approach with some genuinely interesting genre content.  Surely the success of this book means that there will be more to come for Nagamatsu, and if How High We Go in the Dark doesn't reach the prize stage for any literary award, it's entirely possible his next book will.