The Dog Stars

Did You Know?

• Principal photography for the film adaptation began in Italy in April 2025.
• The screenplay for the film adaptation was written by Mark L. Smith.
• The film adaptation was produced by 20th Century Studios.

Plot

Nine years after a flu pandemic and a later blood disease wiped out nearly everyone, a man named Hig lives at a deserted airport in Erie, Colorado. He stays there with his old dog, Jasper, and a survivalist named Bangley. Hig still grieves for his wife, Melissa, who died of the flu while she was pregnant. Hig and Bangley keep watch over the airport. Hig flies patrols in his old Cessna 182, which he calls the Beast, while Bangley handles the weapons and defenses. Their partnership is tense: Bangley sees every stranger as a danger, but Hig is not ready to give up on kindness. Despite Bangley’s objections, Hig regularly takes supplies to a nearby group of Mennonites who are suffering from the blood disease.

Three years before the main story begins, Hig picked up a faint radio reply from the airport in Grand Junction, Colorado. He never went to check it out because Grand Junction is beyond the plane’s point of no return—he cannot fly there and back on the fuel he carries. While on a hunting and fishing trip in the mountains, Jasper dies quietly in his sleep. Hig buries him and stays away from the airport longer than he planned. On his way home, nine armed men follow him. Bangley spots the pursuers from the airport and guides Hig into an ambush, where the attackers are killed. Losing Jasper cuts Hig off from his strongest link to his old life. He decides to finally investigate the Grand Junction transmission, even though he might not make it back.

Flying west, Hig spots livestock, farmed land, and a stone house in a remote canyon. After someone shoots at him, he lands nearby and is captured by an old former Navy SEAL named Pops. Pops’s daughter, Cima, talks her father into letting Hig go. Cima is a doctor who survived the pandemic but lost her husband. Hig stays in the canyon for a few weeks, slowly earning their trust. He and Cima start a romantic relationship. Because a drought threatens the canyon’s water supply, Pops and Cima agree to leave with Hig and move to the Erie airport. The three of them travel to Grand Junction to get aviation fuel. A voice from the control tower tells Hig to land, but he spots a cable stretched across the runway—a trap for planes. He lands past the cable, and the people in the tower open fire. Pops shoots back and kills them. The group refuels the plane and heads back toward Erie.

Reception

NPR described the novel as crackerjack and said it unfolds with the vigor of the film it would become, while also succeeding as a dark, poetic and funny novel. The Boston Globe praised the novel as an insightful account of physical, mental, and spiritual survival unfolded in dramatic and often lyrical prose, with unexpected hope flickering amid darkness.