The Books Behind Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars”

You may be aware that Jacob Elordi is in a new movie out this week: “The Dog Stars,” directed by Ridley Scott, and also starring Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley. What you might not know is that the film is based on a 2012 book by Peter Heller. “The Dog Stars” centers on two lonely survivors of a super-flu pandemic, Hig and Bangley, living in an abandoned airport in Colorado with a loyal hound named Jasper. “It’s like ‘Deliverance’ in an airplane,” John Seabrook wrote when the novel was published. “But it also has lyrical descriptions of landscape and nature reminiscent of James Dickey’s poetry.” I recently spoke with Heller about some of the books that have inspired him, both at work and in his life.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

What fiction put you in a post-apocalyptic state of mind, as you were writing yours?

I had recently read Melville’s “Typee” when I began writing my book. It’s a utopian Polynesian fever dream that tilts into nightmare. But “The Dog Stars” was my first novel, and I didn’t want to plot or plan. I wanted to have as much fun as the reader would in following the narrative current. It didn’t really hit me that my book was post-apocalyptic until I got to about page 3, and I thought, “Crap, I don’t want to write a post-apocalyptic novel . . .”

Which book most corresponds to your personal philosophy of survival?

“On the Beach,” by Nevil Shute, skewered me: the idea that one could keep up daily rituals and courtesies as the shadow of mass death approached. I thought that doing so would take tremendous courage, and I’d like to think I might live that way to the end. There’s also “Ishi in Two Worlds”; like its protagonist, I take great solace in wild places.

If you could only have one book in your bunker, what would it be?

Red Pine’s translation of “Poems of the Masters.” I am enchanted with the poetry of the Tang Dynasty: Li Bai, Xue Tao, Du Fu, Li Shangyin. With only a few lines they can place you knee-deep in a mountain creek, and then break your heart. They are the original blues men and women.

Is there a book you read years ago that you still think about all the time?

It is a poem that haunts me. I cannot shake T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” The music and cadence of its passages and stanzas, even specific lines, come to me often, and I am often moved again.

What is your favorite novel to recommend to others?

“The Snow of the Admiral,” the first novella in Álvaro Mutis’s brilliant “The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll.” It’s a Colombian up-the-river story that, in its ruminative lyricism and propulsion, rivals “Heart of Darkness.”

Where do you weigh in on the adaptation debate? And are there any adaptations you particularly like?