Wanderers
Chuck Wendig
782 Pages, July 2019 | Del Rey Books
“It’s got a ‘The Stand’ thing going on,” my friend explained. So I downloaded a copy. King’s The Stand is one of my favourite apocalyptic novels, and holds up well after 40 years.
Wanderers by Chuck Wendig starts out as a variant ‘zombie apocalypse’ theme with Shalmaneser as the Oracle of Delphi, along with some rather ham-fisted politics.
The zombies are exceptionally well-behaved zombies. They are regular people who involuntarily join a group of zombies who are single-mindedly marching…somewhere. They don’t eat, or excrete, or communicate in any way. They neither sleep nor rest, and their skin is very nearly invulnerable. They don’t bite people, or wear MAGA hats. Indeed, the only undesirable habit they have is that of exploding when detained, much like a hot dog in a microwave oven.
There is an actual plague, too, and Wendig has crafted the ultimate epidemiologist’s nightmare. Extremely contagious, 100% communicable, 100% mortality rate, combined with an incubation period before symptoms show up of months. By the time the CDC becomes aware of the problem, it’s too late. Humanity is doomed. Everyone dies. Oh, the embarrassment.
Or not. There are great end-of-the-world novels where everyone dies (This Is The Way the World Ends, Forge of God) but this one has a less lethal tone.
This begins in an America very familiar to those of us here and now. The country is struggling to function in the face of a full-court press by a paranoid and reactionary right wing, a nasty coupling of fascism and fundamentalism. In the face of the mysterious (The Wanderers, or The Walkers) and an end-of-the-world plague (“White Mask”) America collapses and the Holnist types start to take over with bloody and vicious results.
There is an artificial intelligence (‘Black Swan’) that, for reasons that seem inexplicable at first, can only communicate through traffic signal lights: Yes, No, and Maybe. It seems a rather odd restriction for an entity that could read, understand, and discuss all of Wikipedia in a half hour, but there is an answer further on. For the time being, it’s Oracular; you need to know what questions to ask, and the answers are nebulous, yet crystal-clear after the fact.
There is a diverse cast, including a disgraced CDC scientist, a plucky teen who is sister to the first known walker, a troubled preacher, a fading rock star, and a mad radio personality. In the hands of a lesser writer, they would be stock characters, even stereotypes, but under Wendig they flesh out nicely.
I got into the final third of Wanderers, and found it evolved into something quite fascinating, different, and more like Stephenson’s brilliant Dodge, in Hell than The Stand. Black Swan noticed White Mask well before humanity did, and made some plans.
The result is a very solid apocalypic story. Because much of it is contemporaneous, it’s uncertain that it will have the staying power of The Stand, but in the here and now, it’s a very entertaining read.