Disturbing. For the first half of the book I was willing to follow the story of this flawed artist. But the plot gets him into more and more violence to the point that I was not willing to stay by the protagonist's side. At one point I even stopped reading and pondered the morality of going on consuming his story, from his point of view. Please understand that I read many violent thrillers without having this reaction! There's something about Heller's narrative perspective in this novel that I found insidious and perhaps harmful to human goodness.
Peter Heller's writing is gorgeous. Let's just start there. I loved it in The Dog Stars and I loved it here. My main issue with The Dog Stars was that the book kind of went downhill after the protagonist started interacting with other people, but that's a complaint I often have in post-apocalyptic fiction, so I didn't really blame him too much. That said, plotting was a problem in this book, which also had strange pacing (one chapter is randomly almost 100 pages long while most others are around 20?). The biggest problem is that our protagonist seems set up to be empathized with (complete with tragic backstory) but just comes off as incredibly unlikeable through almost the entire story. It's hard to empathize with a character that keeps punching and killing people. I get that he's being threatened and much of this is in self-defense, but the lengths he goes to to cover up the crimes? I had a hard time finishing a 350+ page book about a character I disliked so much.
