Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.

What I Thought

This is the kind of hopepunk that really works for me – it’s an incredible interconnected story collection exploring the impact of a deadly pandemic across the passage of hundreds of years. I love how it explores the relationship between grief, memory, technology, and tradition, and its vision of a world transformed by death is fascinating. It looks at how technology can create closeness and distance with concepts ranging from relationships in VR games to death hotels and family members immortalized in robot dogs that gradually grow obsolete. Perhaps the most cathartic part of this read for me was its incisive exploration of pandemic under capitalism – essentially, the commodification of death and the terrible cost of that commodification (complete with grim little touches like “funerary bitcoin”).

I don’t know if I can articulate this in a way that makes total sense, but this book just resonates so much for me in how it explores humans adapting to thoroughly modern crises in ways that are absurd and dystopian and sometimes beautiful. Terrible forces may seem insurmountable as they amass, but as decimation continues and the world changes irreversibly, people are going to keep trying to survive, adapt, find meaning, remember, grieve, make it better, and connect with each other. Through the inter-story connections and references, there is a strong sense that we are all closer than we think and our impact matters as time passes and we die. None of this feels simple or saccharine in How High We Go in the Dark – it’s a grim and grounded read in many ways, but all the more resonant in its compassion because of that.

My favorite story was of course Pig Son, which made me sob harder than almost anything I can remember reading. I won’t forget any of this book quickly, but that particular story stands out as the most incredible to me and it seems to have hit others similarly, as Nagamatsu noted in the book’s acknowledgements that he’s received many messages related to that particular story and its emotional impact.

As with any collection, some stories are certainly stronger than others. For example, there are two very similar stories about death workers falling in love with their clients, and some of the explorations of family responsibility and estrangement hit very similar beats throughout. The ultimate sci-fi reveal was interesting but not wholly necessary to me, and for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, it feels like it detracts a bit from the rest of the book’s power. That being said, I read this exactly when I needed to and I remain very grateful that I did.