How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel How High We Go in the Dark is a beautifully written collection of stories about a virus in the year 2030, with ties leading back to the Covid-19 pandemic, and what the world had faced, as well as personal grief dealing with the loss of not only loved ones—but oneself. How High We Go in the Dark follows many people of all different backgrounds and ways of life, and how they navigate the effects of the release of a 30-thousand-year-old plague, released from melting permafrost during global warming.

The novel follows various characters and beings, from a euthanasia theme-park worker to a pig who gains sentience before death, each live very different lives but all have the looming atmosphere of death around them. This is a theme throughout the book, weighing heavily on each snippet of story.

The novel, however, depicts death as something that gives way to growing commerce. How High We Go in the Dark shows many perspectives on death and loss, and how each individual may process it — a muralist painting the sides of a ship with portraits of those lost to the plague, people making suicide pacts in VR, and clients staging final moments with posed corpses; it’s a morbid novel in a thoughtful light, provoking readers to form their own thoughts and perspective on each story and situation, while guiding toward their own reflections.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone? Was released 2016, a collection of 12 stories with a similar emotional theme to his latest 2022 release, How High We Go in the Dark.