How High We Go in the Dark Book Review

A highly compassionate and engaging read, Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark is a testament to the human spirit. This incredibly hopeful novel takes readers into the minds of vastly different people, in different places and times, to demonstrate just how truly connected we all are.

Sequoia Nagamatsu is a Japanese American writer and managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine, an online quarterly dedicated to innovative prose. Originally from Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University and a BA in anthropology from Grinnell College. His work has appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Fairy Tale Review, and Tin House, among others. He is the author of the award-winning short story collection Where We Go When All We Were is Gone and works as an associate professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife, their cat, and a robot dog named Calvino. Visit him online at www.sequoianagamatsu.com.

In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

This might be a weird comparison, but I was getting very strong Black Mirror vibes while reading How High We Go in the Dark—in the sense that each of the chapters reads like standalone short stories, and yet the further one gets into the novel, the more you realize how interconnected the stories, worlds, and characters actually are. Each chapter has a different voice, and are told at different points in time, from completely different characters. But while at first they may seem like standalone stories, the further you get, the more you realize that these people are more connected than you realize. It was super fun and cool to realize this, to almost be reading something that feels like a treasure hunt.

Don't get me wrong, though. While it's fun to connect the dots and come to this understanding of the connectivity of it all, this book is deeply emotional. This book almost made me cry, in just the second chapter. I can't say that about a lot of books, so to me, that speaks to the power of Nagamatsu's ability to be compassionate in his writing, to be honest and full of care in depiction of emotions. The characters here are all dealing with heavy things: a global pandemic; loss through a global pandemic or otherwise; and the weirdest, saddest types of situations that come out of something like this. While this book does have a lot of connections to our modern day experiences with COVID-19, Nagamatsu puts an original twist on this by making the pandemic in the book one that thankfully doesn't overlap much with our own (in the sense of symptoms, how the world reacted to the pandemic, etc.). In this way, Nagamatsu is able to recreate the horror of this type of situation, the never-ending grief, and the non-stop compassion.

Because that's what this book does incredibly well: despite the overwhelming sense of loss and grief, there is even more compassion and hope packed into these stories than one would expect. The stories explore loss and grief if only to come to the conclusions of compassion, humanity's ability to endlessly hope and dream. That makes reading this book both heartbreaking and uplifting. This is what is going to make me recommend it to all of my friends, for sure.

Then you may be wondering, why only the four stars instead of the five? A little bit more than halfway through the book, I was convinced this one was going to be a full five stars for me. However, there were two back-to-back stories—Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Virtual Cafe & Before You Melt Into the Sea—that definitely varied from the consistent first-person narratives and threw me off, especially because I wasn't able to determine how they connected to the rest of the stories. And, more than anything, I wanted just a little bit more out of that magical, heart-stopping last chapter. The earlier chapters had me hooked and I was hanging on, so excited for the final reveal when it all came together, how some of the characters would reunite. The way that last story (in conjunction with the other chapters I couldn't quite fit in) tied it all together fell a bit short for me. I am curious as to what others think, too, about this last chapter, and the other two chapters I am referring to.

I'm definitely going to be thinking about all of this stories, and thus this novel, for a very long time. For more from Nagamatsu, visit him online at www.sequoianagamatsu.com.

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*