Wanderers by Chuck Wendig (feat. Brandon Crilly)

This week, we're joined by special guest Brandon Crilly (Ottawa author and host of Broadcasts From the Wasteland) to tackle Chuck Wendig's shockingly relevant apocalyptic epic, Wanderers! Will we learn more about how to manage a deadly outbreak, or will the 800+ page count do us in for good? Also, apologies for odd audio at times; we're still working out how best to record in the midst of physical distancing requirements!

CW for discussion of disease outbreaks/pandemic, brief mentions of suicide

Intro:
Pump Sting by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4251-pump-sting
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro:
Iron Bacon by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3925-iron-bacon
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

Erin:   0:01
Hello  and welcome back to the Brodacious Book Club,  the podcast where we host a book club -

Matt:   0:12
- where I haven't read the book!

Erin:   0:13
I'm Erin Rockfort

Matt:   0:15
and I'm Matthew Thomas.

Erin:   0:16
And today we're joined by an extra Bro, Ottawa author Brandon Crilly. Hi, Brandon!

Brandon:   0:22
Hi Erin, hi Matt, how's it going?

Matt:   0:23
Very good. Thank you so much. Welcome.

Erin:   0:25
Thanks for agreeing to join us.  

Brandon:   0:27
No worries  

Erin:   0:28
And how much of wanderers have you read, Brandon?

Brandon:   0:35
If we're being honest, not all of it. I made it to about page 274.

Erin:   0:35
We've got a bit of a Goldilocks situation happening here.

Brandon:   0:39
Just a bit.

Erin:   0:41
If you missed it, this week, we're reading Wanderers by Check Wendig, an apocalyptic book based around a disease-based apocalypse.  

Matt:   0:49
Topical. 

Erin:   0:49
Topical. Not as topical when I originally picked it as it is right now.

Matt:   0:55
There you go. Life's little curve balls.

Erin:   0:57
This was a really hard book to summarize. I was realizing as I was...

Brandon:   1:01
I don't know how you're going to summarize the first 200 pages, let alone the whole book.

Erin:   1:04
Yeah, I also don't know.  

Brandon:   1:07
I'm very looking forward to this.  

Erin:   1:09
And I just wanna put a bit of a content warning that if you are highly anxious about the current state of pandemic. Maybe skip this episode. Maybe it's not the best time for that

Matt:   1:21
Might not be for you.

Erin:   1:22
Yeah, there's also lots of politics and sexual violence and regular violence, and if any of those things are not things you want to engage with - we're probably not going to go super in depth with them here, but it might be something to keep in mind if you are going to read the bucket any point. As usual, we will be summarizing the book with some help from Brandon, where appropriate, and afterwards we will have a bit of a discussion about it. As always, we mean no disrespect to the books or the authors discussed were just trying to have some fun with it. We always encourage reading the books for yourselves.

Matt:   1:55
That's right. And as always, of course, we are summarizing books here. We're gonna be going in depth. So spoiler warning.

Erin:   2:02
So the book ends up of opening with a Japanese woman who discovers a comet, and she suddenly begins to believe that the world is overpopulated, and then dies later when the comet passes overhead, which is a very mysterious opening for this book.

Matt:   2:17
I was going to say, what a setting? You know, what an opening situation.

Erin:   2:22
We switch then to what I think is the day after the comet has passed over, in the US now. Which I have to say, I'm not that upset about moving away from some of the fantasy names that we have been encountering for the past few episodes. Most of these names I knew how to pronounce the first time, which is nice.

Matt:   2:41
You know, it's funny you say that because the other day I was often I was thinking about how effortlessly you were able to pronounce a lot of the character names admiring you for that, so...

Erin:   2:51
I do usually cheat beforehand, and I look up pronunciation guides available. I'm not too upset to be with actual people names, for the most part for this book,

Brandon:   3:01
Fantasy characters are actual people what are you talking, about.

Erin:   3:05
So we meet - kind of, I guess, the main character for the book, or at least one of the main characters, Shana, who's a teenager, she's 17, I think, at the beginning of the book. And she wakes up to find that her younger sister, Nessie, has been sleep walking away from the home. She follows her out and can't seem to wake Nessie up no matter what she does. And when she and then her dad start trying to restrain Nessie, she starts convulsing and her nose starts bleeding. So they stop trying to do that. And as they watch, she's walking with the determined route, and other people start joining Nessie, who are also in a similar state of sleepwalking, all headed in the same direction. One of them is Shana's teacher and just sort of random seeming people from the community that she lives in. And we then switch and we meet Benji, who is probably the other most important character in the novel.  

Brandon:   4:01
Yeah, I would say so.  

Erin:   4:01
Yeah, yeah, he's has a big role to play.

Matt:   4:04
And what is that role?

Erin:   4:05
He's a doctor, and he's a former CDC employee. We later learned that he was fired from the CDC for fudging some numbers where he encountered a disease spread, but people didn't believe that the disease was spreading, so he made up some numbers to get a better response. Brandon's nodding. Did you get that far in the book?

Brandon:   4:25
I did, yeah. And it starts - you know that you got fired for some reason, then slowly you get little bits and pieces as to why. He's been - you meet his boss and his boss hates him, wants him nowhere near anything. And then gradually realized that he thought - even he doesn't even think he did the right thing anymore. He starts to question.

Erin:   4:43
Yeah, because it obviously created some issues with actually trying to deal with the disease after it got out that he made up the numbers to do with it. And he gets contacted by this woman called Sadie. She's a programmer, and they've both seen the news about this weird sleepwalking outbreak, and she wants his help with it. She created this AI that's called Black Swan, and apparently that's what requested his help specifically on this. Whatever this weird sleepwalking disease is. Those are sort of our main two characters, Shana and Benji.

Matt:   5:14
Mhmm.

Erin:   5:15
And the beginnings of like I said, this weird sleepwalking thing. We cut back to Shana and how people are starting to respond to the sleepwalkers, like there's paramedics and cops and trying to stop people from doing this, they try to sedate the sleep walkers, but the needles can't penetrate their skin. A cop also fails to taser the one guy who's Shana's teacher. And when that doesn't work, the cop tries to arrest him, and as soon as he starts restraining him, the teacher starts to convulse and ends up violently exploding.

Matt:   5:50
Ah, wow, that escalated very quickly.  

Brandon:   5:54
Yeah, pretty intense.

Matt:   5:54
Yeah, you go from vague supernatural phenomenon to exploding people.

Erin:   5:59
Yeah, and of course, that makes the news.

Matt:   6:01
Right. As it would as it does, right?

Erin:   6:04
Yeah, there's also - and this is sort of throughout the whole novel - there's these little interspersed pieces off like social media news, or like, headlines and stuff where it's showing kind of real time like how people are responding to this. And of course, in this case, it's like, "Oh, is it terrorists? Is it crisis actors? What's happening?" Which feels a little bit too real at times, but...

Brandon:   6:26
And we find out to, I think very early, that there's a presidential election coming up?  

Erin:   6:31
There is a presidential election, yes.  

Matt:   6:33
Really. 

Brandon:   6:34
And it's - oh, yeah, it is phenomenally real world, which I think is part of the reason why I only made it so far.

Matt:   6:41
Fair enough, enough trauma to deal with in your real life.

Erin:   6:43
And specifically the presidential election is between a lady president who is - I don't know if she has ever directly identified as a Democrat, but like -

Brandon:   6:51
It seems pretty clear.

Erin:   6:53
I don't think that's a leap to make that she's of that particular American party. And she's being challenged by this guy who's a loud-mouthed populist.

Matt:   7:05
Right.  

Brandon:   7:06
Pretty much like - can we mention the names of actual political leaders? Will you get into trouble if I do that?

Erin:   7:12
I don't think so. I don't think enough people listen to this podcast that we will get in trouble.

Brandon:   7:17
It's - that's fair. It was very much like if Hillary Clinton was the incumbent and Trump decided to challenge her instead of Obama's record. That's kind of what...

Erin:   7:26
Yeah, it is very much that world. And I mean, I think those implications are very intentional, because Chuck Wendig is a pretty outspoken Trump...hater?

Matt:   7:38
Antagonist? Sure.

Brandon:   0:00
Oh, antagonist, yeah.  

Erin:   7:38
I don't think that's coming out of left field at all.

Matt:   7:40
You know, actually, when was this book written? Do you know if -

Brandon:   7:42
That's what I was just looking up, it was published 2019. So I don't know when he wrote it...  

Erin:   7:47
It came out last year.  

Matt:   7:48
So it's fresh, I see.

Erin:   7:49
Yeah, but it could have been written during the 2016 presidential election.

Brandon:   7:54
Quite easily,

Matt:   7:54
Wouldn't be surprised.

Erin:   7:56
But even if not like, I feel like we're still feeling the effects of that pretty strongly in the cultural consciousness, even for those of us who are -

Matt:   8:04
Being all three people on this podcast. Yes, indeed.

Erin:   8:07
So Benji ends up getting involved with, like the CDC people who are going into investigate this sleepwalking disease. He goes to meet - the teacher who exploded, he goes to meet his wife - and it turns out that the hospital lost the bodies of both - "lost the bodies" air quotes, because this is an audio medium - of both the teacher who died and also the cop who was also in the police car when he exploded

Brandon:   8:34
Yeah because he dies, for some reason, which I never found out why.

Erin:   8:37
I kind of understood it to be like a side effect of explosion.

Brandon:   8:41
Oh, okay!  

Erin:   8:42
That was my understanding. I don't know if that's necessarily supported by the text. But we do find out later that the bodies were taken from the hospital by someone. And people find out the Benji is working with the CDC, which creates some issues because he's not very popular because of the whole lying about disease thing that happened earlier.

Matt:   9:03
Right, right.

Erin:   9:03
So the CDC people do take over studying the sleepwalkers. Shana connects with a young man who works with CDC named Arav, and her dad shows up in an RV. They have some issues between them, like he wants her to keep going to school or whatever, but she wants to stay with Nessie and he ends up kind of supporting her and buying this RV so they can follow Nessie across wherever it is that she ends up going. Then we get this interlude with this guy named Jerry Garland, who is a theme park owner. Jerry Garland is the son of a theme park mogul.  

Matt:   9:38
Sure. 

Erin:   9:38
And is trying to expand his brand. But as he's breaking new ground on a theme park, he gets attacked by bats that come surging out.

Matt:   9:46
All right. Yeah, let that simmer for a moment. Attacked by bats. That's - all right.

Brandon:   9:52
The expression on your face right now, I'm sure, was on my face as I was going through this book.

Erin:   9:58
It comes completely out of nowhere too, like, it's just like suddenly we're in this interlude with this dude who's not a very nice guy and is like abusing the people around him. Basically, he starts to get sick after this event, and he was also humiliated, so he's trying to make up for that. And as he gets sicker, he gets more and more mean to the people around him and less able to do his job So he eventually gets fired by the board, or however these kinds of corporations work.

Matt:   0:00
Sure.  

Erin:   10:26
And then we kind of cut forward to several months later, where he is in the Everglades, for some reason.

Matt:   10:32
As you do.

Erin:   10:34
And he falls into a coma and dies, and we get a very foreshadow-y piece of information that nobody would find him until it was too late.

Matt:   10:42
Wow, what an interlude.

Erin:   10:44
it's like a pretty significant piece of writing too.

Brandon:   10:47
It is, it is, like I skimmed it pretty heavily, I'm not gonna lie.

Erin:   10:51
And like you get all these characters, like there's a bunch of people introduced in it that don't matter at all because they never come up again. But anyway, then we meet Matthew, who is not that much like you.

Brandon:   11:00
Oh, yeah.

Erin:   11:02
Matthew is a pastor.

Matt:   11:03
Right. 

Erin:   11:04
Who's not the greatest dude but, like kind of chill.

Matt:   11:09
What does that mean? It's not a stellar combination.

Erin:   11:13
Like he thinks his depressed wife should maybe just try harder to not be depressed, but when she's like, "No, I do actually need antidepressants" he does eventually relent. So kind of not a great guy, not as much of a jerk as you could be I guess.

Matt:   11:25
Not actively bad, but not good.  

Erin:   11:28
Not great.  

Matt:   11:29
Fair.

Erin:   11:29
At this point, at least.  

Matt:   11:31
Sure.  

Erin:   11:31
So he also meets this guy named Ozark, who's real sketchy.

Brandon:   11:36
Yeah.  

Matt:   11:36
With a name like Ozark...

Erin:   11:37
Ozark thinks that something's up with these sleepwalkers on TV, and also maybe something satanic is up, specifically, which is your first red flag that something is not right with Ozark.

Matt:   11:48
Right.  

Erin:   11:51
The reason that they kind of know each other is that Mathew's son works for Ozark. So Shana continues to go with - it begins to be called the flock, like the group of sleepwalkers and then also the people who are their loved ones who are traveling with them, who become known as the shepherds - and she gets to know some of the other shepherds, like some of them are from their community, but as they continue toe walk, more and more people join the flock. At one point, there's an incident where there's a big storm brewing, and the CDC tries to get them to change course because they're just kind of sleepwalking directly into the storm. So they park a trailer in their way to try and force a turning. But the sleepwalkers just Spider Man crawl over the trailer, and it's terrifying.

Brandon:   12:31
Yeah.  

Matt:   12:33
That sounds terrifying.

Erin:   12:34
So of course, people watching this on TV, because there's news helicopters and whatnot, are like, "what's happening with these people?" Matthew, the next day, gives a sermon where he starts to really talk about the walkers and starts to narrow in on some of that satanic underlying...

Erin:   12:50
Energy?  

Erin:   12:51
Themes, yeah, sure. He starts calling them the Devils Pilgrims.

Brandon:   12:55
I think we've reached the point, cause I don't remember that. So I think we've made the point at least in his arc, where...

Erin:   12:58
Where you did not get any further?

Brandon:   13:01
I don't think so.

Erin:   13:02
And there's this thing of like, oh, the words are kind of uncharacteristic of him, they may be came from somewhere else, but Ozark is super into the sermon. He's like, "yeah, you did a great job buddy."

Matt:   13:10
Yeah, better believe he is.

Erin:   13:13
So as the walkers start to come through this one town they're met with protesters because there's starting to be quite a movement against them. But we also meet this character named Marcy, who's an ex-cop who has a brain injury. She's not doing well generally, like it causes her a lot of pain. It really makes it so she can't function super well. But as soon as she gets into close proximity with the walkers as they're coming through her town, she feels a lot better. And when she looks at them, she can see a glow. So when the walkers are coming through, and she starts to pick up on the fact that the protesters, that they're going to start something, she manages to stop there being any violence. Somebody tries to fire on them, and she's able to stop it before anyone can actually get hurt. And at that point, she starts to travel with the walkers as well. She joins them because, like I said, she feels a lot better when she's in their presence.  

Matt:   14:00
Right.

Erin:   14:00
So Shana also finds out that before all of this started to happen, her sister Nessie was emailing back and forth with their mother, who left a few years ago, and that her mom sent Nessie a mysterious package right before the sleepwalking started, that had a test tube in it.

Matt:   14:17
Suspicious, yes, a little suspect.

Erin:   14:20
Yeah, and she starts to feel a little bit betrayed because, like, she didn't get a mysterious package from their mom. She and Arav, the like young CDC worker, also start have a little bit of a romance,  developed slowly as the book goes on. Benji also is - he's sort of looking and trying to figure out what the heck this is, trying to find, like common links, because, like I said, it's people joining from, like, every place they pass through. But the only thing he finds is that the walkers are very healthy, and they're very intelligent, generally speaking, and there are also no very young children or very elderly people. He and Sadie, who is the woman who made Black Swan, the programmer, they also become a couple. And at this point we finally get some payoff on the Jerry Garland storyline because finally his body is found in the Everglades. It's covered in fungus. The CDC takes it in and starts to try and figure out what happened to him. I just have in my notes here, "Matthew starts a podcast," which is kind of funny.

Matt:   15:15
There you go, yeah. 

Brandon:   15:17
Yeah, a little meta.

Erin:   15:19
A little meta. There's also this thing where he's, like, kind of losing time and awareness as he's doing this, like giving sermons over this podcast and talking about the sleepwalkers.

Matt:   15:28
Right.  

Erin:   15:28
And he goes toe Ozarks for a pig roast and he finds that Ozark has this big fancy house and all these questionable friends, and they do some shooting and Matthew is kind of uncomfortable with this. But he's like, it's fine, I guess, even when, even when that - one of the things that Ozark has as like target practice is like a cut out of the lady president.

Matt:   15:49
Right, no red flags there.

Erin:   15:51
No red flags, it's fine. Homeland Security also starts to try and take over the care of the flock, partially because of the ongoing election tension that's going on. The - like I said, I don't know that he is identified as a Republican, but the like Republican challenger is putting some pressure on the president to do something. She calls in Homeland Security, which is obviously not ideal. We also start to find out a little bit more about what's happening. We find out that the sleep walkers are infected with nanotech, or at least Benji suspects that that's what's happening based on like the data he's been given. There's a lot more - there's a lot more scientific info in the book, but like, I'm not gonna relay that, because it's not very interesting

Matt:   16:34
Wha a twist, okay. 

Erin:   16:36
They also find out that whatever fungus Jerry Garland was covered in was what killed him, and that he had some sort of really rare disease that's similar to white nose syndrome in bats. And also remember, he was attacked by bats.

Matt:   16:51
Indeed.

Erin:   16:52
So as Homeland Security is descending and Benji is like finding out all this stuff, there's - a new character kind of rolls into where the flock are all chugging along. His name is Pete Corley. He's this aging, washed up rock star. And, yes, we are still meeting new characters.

Matt:   17:09
I was going to say it's - we're fairly - are we at least half way?

Erin:   17:15
We're at least 300 pages into this book by now, according to -

Brandon:   17:18
We are for sure.

Erin:   17:19
Yeah, because Brandon has not read this, so we're chugging along at a good pace. 

Brandon:   17:24
I do not know this.

Erin:   17:24
We get a little bit of backstory, cause the book likes to do a thing where they will introduce a character and then drop them for a couple chapters and then bring them back in, which is fine, except that it makes it hard to summarize it because you get a chapter of introduction and then you get nothing for a couple of more chapters. But Pete Corley is washed up rock star, and he's gay but closeted. And so his bandmates are sort of threatening him with outing if he doesn't like, walk the line, and if he doesn't show up for rehearsals and stuff on time.  

Matt:   17:53
Right.  

Erin:   17:53
And he basically shows up to get some publicity, because obviously, there's a lot of news crews there. Benji is like, "sure, you can stay as long as you advocate for the flock, advocate for the CDC to stay, and we'll let you get a much publicity out of this is you want to." And he agrees, and he joins in with the shepherds who are trying to ward off Homeland Security because that will obviously be a much more militarized version of what they're currently experiencing. And Homeland Security does take Pete Corley down, like they beat him up as they're kind of advancing in on the flock. But Shana manages to get footage of it on her phone, which she then gives to the press. And that blows up, and eventually there's enough public backlash that the president orders Homeland Security to back off.

Erin:   18:38
Right.

Erin:   18:39
So then the CDC is just in charge. We also learn at this point that Marcy, the ex cop with the brain injury, that she can kind of communicate with the sleepwalkers. She can at least hear something from them, sometimes.

Matt:   18:52
Something as in voices or as in frequency, or...

Erin:   18:55
As in voices, like she even sometimes hears thoughts, or like pieces of thoughts.

Erin:   19:00
Right. 

Erin:   19:00
So Pete Corley blends in with the rest of the shepherds, and Shana argues with her dad, who has just kind of been cooped up in the RV and hasn't actually been out to see Nessie. And eventually she and Arav, the young CDC guy, they sleep together, I think, like on her 18th birthday or something, cause he's in his twenties, so he's kind of weirded out by the fact that she's still technically in high school.

Matt:   19:22
Right, as you would be.

Erin:   19:26
Yeah, as you would be in that situation. It jumps - we jump back to Matthew, who finds out that Ozark gave his wife - her name is Autumn - some Xanax, and neither of them really trust Ozark, but -

Matt:   19:36
At this point, right, why would you?

Brandon:   0:00
Yeah.  

Erin:   19:39
And like his podcast is doing really well, he's networking really well, so he's kind of like, you know, we can put up with this kind of weird guy for this, it's fine, which, eeh, but anyway, And then we cut to a bit of a flashback with Shana and Nessie's mom, who was feeling very suicidal before she left them. And she called like a suicide hotline, and it was some weird, like screening where they asked her if she wanted to sign up for an experimental treatment, which she agrees to, and then they like come and take her away.

Brandon:   20:09
Okay.

Matt:   20:09
What? I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. How were they marketing it as a suicide hotline? That's nefarious. 

Erin:   20:19
Yeah, it's something like she calls the hotline and says, you know, that she's feeling really down. I think she gets like switched lines or something where it's like, this is obviously something that they're using to find people for this "experimental treatments."

Matt:   0:00
I see.  

Erin:   20:32
Air quotes. There's also some stuff happening in the background where Benji begins to suspect that something bigger is happening and Black Swan, the AI, directly kind of implies it to him. He confronts Sadie about it, and she confesses to him that Black Swan actually sent itself a message from the future, that the disease they found in Jerry Garland is going to create a mass extinction event, and therefore, Black Swan has sent this nanotech into certain people to try and create some people who will survive the apocalypse, because somehow it keeps them from contracting the illness.

Matt:   21:12
Wow, that's a huge - that's a big reveal. Okay, I'm assuming you didn't get that far.

Brandon:   0:00
Nope!  

Erin:   21:21
Which does put it more squarely in the realm of like, oh, this is definitely science fiction.  

Brandon:   21:27
Yeah.

Erin:   21:30
Yeah, that's kind of a wild reveal that just happens.

Brandon:   21:31
At what point does this happen?

Erin:   21:33
This is - we're probably getting on close to 50% of the way through the book now.

Matt:   21:37
We're only 50% of the way? Oh my goodness. 

Erin:   21:40
This is like an 800 page book. This is a real big one.

Matt:   21:43
They all seem to be, all the books that you pick, Erin.

Erin:   21:45
It also reveals that Shana and Nessie's mom was involved in, like, the group Black Swan originally formed to try and send out this nanotech, which is why Nessie was one the people chosen for it. And they end up calling it the White Mask.

Matt:   21:58
Excellent name. Very cool. Very awesome.

Erin:   22:00
Meanwhile, Matthew is going on all these conservative radio shows and stuff, and people are like, so the president's probably the Anti-Christ, right? And he's like, yeah this is fine.

Matt:   22:07
Yeah, Yeah, of course. Oh jeez, Matthew.

Brandon:   22:12
Ohhhh.

Matt:   22:12
Poor misguided sweet Matthew

Erin:   22:14
Poor Matthew. Matthew goes on a bad turn.

Matt:   22:17
Right.

Brandon:   22:18
Wow.  

Erin:   22:19
Things go weird.  

Matt:   22:21
Real fast. You know, I was trying to pin down like what genre this is, because I was thinking that as well, as you were reading. I was like, this doesn't seem very science fiction-y. But with the introduction of time travel and AI...

Erin:   22:33
Yeah, yeah, the nanotech and all that. He also does attend a rally, Matthew does, but he feels bad about doing it And, like, starts to feel guilty about the company that he's keeping.

Brandon:   22:43
Oh good.

Erin:   22:43
Which, like, it only took you so long to figure that out. It's only been like, you know, a few weeks, a month or so, I don't remember. His wife Autumn overdoses on the antidepressants, I think accidentally, but it's kind of left a little bit ambiguous. And he goes to confront Ozark, who gave her the pills, and they finally have it out. And there's finally the revelation, that is not really a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention, that Ozark is not a good guy and involved in like an explicitly white supremacist militia.

Matt:   23:15
Wow, what?

Brandon:   23:19
That's about right.

Matt:   23:19
You know, I knew he was a good guy, wasn't expecting the white supremacy root. But fair enough. All the telltale signs are there.

Erin:   23:25
They were all in place. Ozark beats him up and takes him captive, basically. He still wants him as like a speaker, I guess, for the movement

Brandon:   23:34
He's useful, right? 

Erin:   23:35
Yeah, he's a useful voice. And we see society getting worse in sort of flashes. Shana is like taking pictures of various things, and we get to see society breaking down as the fungus, the White Mask, the disease, starts to spread, and also just politically, things start getting worse. And Shana also finds out at this point that she's pregnant, which is a bit of a precarious place to be in...

Matt:   23:56
Bad time.

Erin:   23:57
In the apocalypse. Ozark has kept Matthew like, chained up in his basement, doing scripted podcast episodes, basically, which - I promise is not happening here.

Matt:   24:08
Wow, at least not like, explicitly, you know.

Erin:   24:13
And also you're not chained up. I hope that's -

Brandon:   24:16
I was told not to say anything.

Matt:   24:18
I'll never tell. Never tell.

Erin:   24:20
This is my master plan, mwahaha. And he actually tries to warn the flock that Ozark is gonna do an attack on them via the podcast episodes, tries to kind of put a coded message in, but he gets caught for going off script and then they break his hand.   

Matt:   24:35
Ooh.

Erin:   24:35
I mean, I've skimmed over some of the worst of, like, the things he endures in this section of the book, just cause it's not fun to chat about, but...

Matt:   24:44
Sweet, naive Matthew.

Erin:   24:45
Yeah, Matthew goes through some bad times.

Matt:   24:48
Right.  

Erin:   24:48
More and more people are getting infected, like Arav is infected, several of the shepherds start to get infected, but also like the group is bonding more and more, like Corley comes out to them, and Marcy confesses that she can hear the walkers sometimes, Shana ends up telling Arav about the baby, and she and her father reconnect. And honestly, like, I got a little bit emotional at this point, it was genuinely like touching to read. So then we get to Ozark's attack on the flock. And of course, it's like, everyone's doing really great after this big heart to heart, and Shana's dad comes out of the RV for the first time in months to see Nessie, and they're like bonding really well and then immediately we're into like gunfire. And Shana and Nessie's dad gets shot and killed.  

Matt:   25:33
Oh.  

Erin:   25:34
And it's horrible.

Matt:   25:35
Right.  

Erin:   25:35
This was one of the parts where I almost peace'd out of the book. A few of the walkers get shot, like the sleepwalkers, so like, even though their skin couldn't be pierced by syringes or anything, they were clearly still able to be shot. Before they can, you know, completely wipe out the group, Marcy steps up and goes guerrilla-style and takes out the shooters, but she herself gets ambushed by Ozark and knocked out and taken back to his lair. When the walkers were shot, the nanotech came out of them - because they were dead.  

Matt:   26:07
Right.  

Erin:   26:08
It then goes into some of the nearby people, so it goes into some of the shepherds, basically, who have been walking with them. And one of the people who it goes into is Shana. So now she is a sleepwalker.  

Matt:   26:20
Interesting.  

Erin:   26:21
Yeah, we kind of leave it there for a while, we don't see what happens with that. We get some general world building about how the president gets assassinated and the militia just kind of takes over. The Supreme Court puts the other guy in charge, even though society is falling apart at the moment.One of Ozarks allies tries to help Matthew get out of the dungeon where he's being kept, and the helper gets killed, but Matthew does manage to escape, so that's kind of nice.

Matt:   26:50
That is - I mean, it's a consolation prize, right, to everything else that you just described. But...

Erin:   26:55
Yeah, so he gets out and he manages to reunite with his wife, Autumn, who he thought was dead after the overdose. But she's not, she's fine on. So they reunited, and it's nice and sweet.

Brandon:   27:06
Oh. I thought she was dead, that's awesome!

Erin:   27:06
I know. He does, too, like Ozark straight up tells him like, Oh, your wife is dead. But clearly that was a lie. Benji communicates with Black Swan to find out where the flock is actually going. It's this place called Ouray. Like a small town in the Midwest, I think. We finally reconnect with Shana, who is in sort of a simulation, like that's where her mind is, at least, while she's in sleepwalker mode.

Matt:   27:30
In walking, yeah.

Erin:   27:30
She reconnects with her sister, and there she sees and gets to meet all of the other walkers. And they're in, like, a simulated version of the town that they're going to. So they've kind of picked out houses and, like, decided where they're gonna go. And her mother is also there because she was hooked up to a machine in, like, whatever lab it was that created this nanotech in which Black Swan came from. So she actually gets to talk to her mother again.

Brandon:   27:57
Okay, that's...lovely?

Erin:   27:59
It's very odd, people are just kind of going about their lives in this simulation, like some of them are like dating each other, even though they have never met in real life.

Brandon:   28:07
So kind of like the real world.

Erin:   28:08
Kind of, yeah.

Matt:   28:08
I was gonna say, to what end, though? Why?

Erin:   28:12
I guess they're figuring, like, when they wake up eventually they can...

Matt:   28:15
No, sure, that I understand, fair, that I get. But why this town?

Erin:   28:20
For some reason, Black Swan's algorithms decided that this was the place to go. because it would be like safer, easily defensible, or something like that. I think we're given a bit of an explanation, but it's just along the lines of like, oh, it'll be

Matt:   28:32
It's good, it's a good place.

Erin:   28:34
It'll be a good town for them, yeah. Also Pete Corley's boyfriend comes to be with him, which is sweet, but we get this weird complication that almost as soon as the boyfriend arrives, they then leave because Corley has like a wife and children. And they're going to go and try and track down the wife and children to try and like, make things right with them. There's a lot of subplots happening in this book.

Brandon:   28:53
Yeah, holy sh*t.

Erin:   28:55
I think that's why this book is like 800 pages long, is because there's way too many subplots happening.  

Matt:   29:00
No kidding.

Brandon:   29:01
There's a lot in the first 200, holy crap.

Matt:   29:02
You keep mentioning characters as if you had mentioned them previously like oh yeah, such and such got married - who? Who is this? Right, I'm trying to catch up.

Erin:   29:12
There's a lot. Oh and they take Shana's Dad's RV. Meanwhile, Matthew and his wife Autumn are spying on the militia who are sort of a culmination of like Ozark's people and other similar militias who have all kind of united under the new president. And they're trying to find their son, because you remember their son was working for Ozark right back at the beginning, and is now part of the militia. It's a various Hitler Youth-esque army happening. That Ozark is trying to like, train up all these young boys. And gradually, more and more people are becoming infected, like Benji and Sadie both find out that they both have the disease, the White Mask, and people are dying, and the disease is so infectious that people are having to burn bodies. And as we already know, based on what Black Swan from the future has said, this is an apocalyptic event. Shana in the simulation tries to speak to Black Swan but doesn't really learn anything she tries to ask, like, "is my baby gonna be okay?" Because remember, she's pregnant.  

Brandon:   30:12
Oh, right, I forgot about that.

Erin:   30:12
Yeah, and it doesn't know.  

Brandon:   30:16
Oh.  

Erin:   30:16
Yeah.  

Matt:   30:17
Not a vote of confidence.

Erin:   30:18
She's not pregnant in the simulation, but obviously her body is continuing to - the bodies don't really, like, they don't need food or anything while they're sleep walking. But she's still gestating a baby that's still happening somehow.

Matt:   30:30
Magic - science!

Brandon:   30:32
Magic.

Erin:   30:32
Nanotech, shrug.  

Matt:   30:34
Magic of science.

Erin:   30:36
Benji tries to go and find some medication to slow the disease, which he is successful in finding. But he is attacked by some militia guys and ends up leaving behind most of the medication and then never goes back for it, which is one of those things where it's like, "Go back for the medicine, dude."  

Brandon:   30:52
I thought you were smart.

Erin:   30:52
Yeah, come on. So Pete Corley, the rock star, and his boyfriend, they know where the flock is headed. But Landry is infected so he can't go to Pete's family with him. So he just gets, like, dropped on the side of the road to walk back to Ouray. And he does eventually end up like reconnecting with the group. In the quest to get to his son, Matthew steals a truck to get into Ozark's camp. He succeeds, and he actually runs into his son. But his son doesn't recognize him, and he sort of accidentally, as he's going about in disguise, ends up in the dungeons, and meets up with Marcy, who is still alive and just has been kept for several months, for some reason.

Brandon:   31:31
Okay.

Erin:   31:31
Which I'm not too unhappy about cause she's definitely the best character, but that's entirely beside the point. And Matthew overhears that Ozark knows that the flock is going to Ouray and is going to attack them there. And Matthew has like a huge emotional breakdown, and Marcy comforts him. But he manages get back out of Ozark's camp, and he reconnects with Autumn, and he decides that he's going to go try to warn the flock about the attack. Meanwhile, his wife stays to try and get their son. When the flock gets to Ouray, there's still people there, like there's still living, non-infected people, which makes moving in a little bit difficult.

Matt:   32:04
Awkward.

Brandon:   32:06
Right, because it's an actual town.

Matt:   32:07
This house is mine now. Please leave

Erin:   32:09
Because they're kind of, ah, rural town like there hasn't been a lot of infection there, at least not as much. So they're actually are still quite a few people there, but they're pretty chill about, for the most part, letting newcomers in. There's a sheriff, his name is Dove. He's not really important to the plot at all, but he's pretty chill.  

Erin:   32:27
Sweet Dove.  

Erin:   32:28
Yeah, he's a nice boy. And the other reason that they're chill is because Landry, Pete Corley's boyfriend, got there first and was able to be like, "Hey, by the way, there's a bunch of people that are gonna show up here real soon. Let's be chill about it."

Matt:   32:41
They're all asleep and are going to move into your houses, just a heads up.

Erin:   32:46
And they do, literally like as soon as they get to the town, they just split up and, like, go into their houses that they have in the simulation version.

Brandon:   32:56
I'm with you.  

Matt:   32:56
As you do.

Erin:   32:57
Yeah. Matthew shows up and he uses Marcy's name to like get himself in, so that they're not immediately like "Hey, you're that jerk who ran that podcast, get outta here."  

Matt:   33:09
Ah yes.

Erin:   33:10
But he does manage to warn them about Ozark, and Benji tries to get through to Black Swan and is like, "Can't you just make them get up and walk somewhere else to keep them safe?" and Black Swan is like, "No, that would take too much energy," and we just kind of accept this.  

Brandon:   33:25
Okay.  

Erin:   33:25
Which is not really an answer, but that's fine. So instead they just kind of have to hunker in place and try to defend themselves from attackers. And meanwhile - so one of the things that the White Mask does is that it destroys the brain function, so people essentially develop dementia in like the later stages. So Arav, Shana's...baby daddy? That's probably not appropriate.

Matt:   33:45
I mean, but it's accurate.

Erin:   33:48
He's starting to get into those like latter stages where he is losing his mind. And then the attack starts to happen. And somehow, despite having advanced warning, it doesn't matter that much because people still get shot and, like the sleepwalkers, specifically get shot really early on. Like we cut to Shauna in the simulation, who's just kind of standing around watching people living their life, and then suddenly they disappear from the simulation, which means that they have been killed in real life. But it's like, how did you guys not lock this down a bit better? Like shouldn't this have been the number one concern?

Brandon:   34:24
Exactly.

Matt:   34:24
Right, right.  

Erin:   34:25
She goes to talk to Black Swan, because she realizes that something is horribly wrong, and learns that there's an attack happening and wants to help. So Black Swan shows her the door to like the inner sanctum of itself, and through it she manages to connect with and talk to Arav, and they kind of reunite in a weird way. Meanwhile, the rest of the people are trying to defend the flock. Everyone's just kind of running around wildly, cause Matthew's still trying to find his son, there's no sign of his wife at all. Meanwhile, Ozark, who's like, obviously sick by this point and is not doing great, he thinks that maybe Benji has a cure and he wants that. And he's got grenades and a tank, which is not great news, and Benji and trying to pretend like he has a cure.

Matt:   35:14
Smart boy.

Erin:   35:14
Yeah, bluff a little bit. Marcy was brought there, for some reason, but she starts getting strength back cause she's near the flock again. She and Matthew kind of go about knocking some guys out. They do run into Matthew's son and manage to knock him out, but he tries to shoot his dad first. And then we cut back to Shana and Arav having their meeting and basically Arav, who's already dying quite significantly, he basically takes on a bunch of the nanotech that has been released by the people who have died and uses it kind of as a walking bomb. Like he walks up towards Ozark's men and then releases the nanotech, so it goes into them and then explodes them because it has that exploding...

Matt:   35:57
Power?  

Matt:   35:58
Power.  

Matt:   35:59
Ability.

Erin:   35:59
So they just activate that.

Erin:   36:01
Right.  

Erin:   36:02
And he dies as well, but he gets uploaded to the simulation for a short period of time while the nanotech is in him, so he and Shana do you get to, like, say a proper goodbye. Yeah, it's nice.

Matt:   36:14
Sad, but nice.

Erin:   36:15
Yeah! Ozark somehow manages to avoid the nanotech, and he makes a run for it. As he's running, Pete Corley, who is coming down the road in his RV, runs him over.

Matt:   36:27
Poetic justice.  

Erin:   36:29
Yeah, which is one of those parts that is, like, legitimately very good, because you get to see Pete Corley, who's just going down the road in his RV and then just suddenly, like, runs some dude over, and he doesn't know what's happening, like he doesn't know that this guy definitely deserved to be run over. And while he's sort of there like, "Oh my God, I hit someone," Matthew comes out and like shoots Ozark dead. And so Pete Carly's even more like,

Matt:   36:52
"What's going on?"

Erin:   36:53
Yeah, what's happening?

Matt:   36:55
Poor Pete, poor Pete.

Erin:   36:56
Pete had a bad time, but like, Matthew got his revenge. So that's kind of nice. Ozark dies, but in the simulation like Shauna does not re-emerge from Black Swan's inner sanctum, so they don't really know what happened to her. Like her body is still alive, but her mind no longer exists in the simulation. So Nessie kind of assumes that she's dead. There's sort of the aftermath of the attack. Benji is still mostly not sick, even as weeks and weeks pass. Like he's infected with the virus, he knows because there's like a test you can do, but he's not developing any symptoms. And Sadie confesses that the rest of their team gave up all of their supply of like the medication that he had so that he could have all of it. So they've been getting sicker and sicker, and he's been okay. It's like some sort of anti fungal medication, so it slows the growth. There's a bit of a resolution to Matthew and his son, because the son is the only survivor of Ozark's Group. Neither of them know what happened to their wife/mom. He's still kind of like, "Screw you, dad," so that's also not great.

Brandon:   0:00
Okay.  

Matt:   38:00
Well, can't have it all.

Erin:   38:00
Yeah, and Pete Corley, if you'll remember, was going to try and visit his family, like his wife and kids, and make things right. We never find out what happened with that, he says he was unable to find them, but it's mentioned that the other characters think he's lying about that. But we never find out, like if he found them dead or if they rejected him, or like what happened. We never get a resolution on that. And then we cut away to Shana, who wakes up like, years later out of the sleep that she was in. And she's woken up months later than everyone else woke up. And she sees Benji, who has managed to survive the fungus, and he basically explains that because he was on this medication, the virus just kind of wore itself out and he was able to survive it, which is cool. Would've been great if he'd maybe picked up more medicine.

Brandon:   38:46
Yeah, maybe.

Erin:   38:48
Also, she finds out that her baby was born and is healthy, which must be a wild thing to wake up to.

Matt:   38:53
No kidding, oh my goodness. 

Brandon:   38:56
Isn't there a whole lot of like bodily changes that, like...?

Erin:   38:58
Yeah! Like we don't get any more information about what that must have been like for everyone involved, but I imagine it could not have been a fun time.  

Brandon:   39:07
Nope.

Matt:   39:30
No, doesn't sound pleasant at all.

Erin:   39:30
We also get sort of a play by play of what happened, which is mostly a huge bummer in that like, most of the characters got sick and died.

Matt:   39:30
Right.

Brandon:   39:30
Oh probably.

Erin:   39:30
We do learn that about 1% of the population are - not immune, because they're still carriers, but they don't ever get symptoms. So about 1% of the population of the world did survive, which includes Marcy and Matthew, which is kinda nice.

Brandon:   39:31
Oh!  

Matt:   39:31
Statistically unlikely. That

Erin:   39:33
Yeah, which is statistically unlikely, that of the named characters, several of them did make it. Also Dove, the mayor of Ouray. Sweet Dove did make it. Again, he has no importance on the plot whatsoever, but he did survive.

Matt:   39:46
Good to know.

Erin:   39:47
And we learn that Pete Corley may or may not have survived, that he kind of took off after his boyfriend died to like tour the world, and we don't know what happened after that. So civilization is in tatters, but there's still people around, so it's not completely gone. And there's then this question that's hanging over the characters of like, why did Black Swan tell them that it was an extinction event if 1% of the population was gonna be immune or functionally immune? Shana and Nessie actually reunite, like in the real world. She finds out that their mom died because the computers that like she was hooked up to shut down at some point. The nano swarm and Black Swan are still technically around, and Shana is still able to communicate with Black Swan because they were entwined for a while while she was in the inner sanctum. And she realizes that Black Swan actually started the White Mask disease, the fungal disease, and was the one that caused this whole thing in the beginning.

Matt:   40:45
Interesting. Wow. Okay, that's another big twist right at the end.

Brandon:   40:50
Yeah.

Erin:   40:50
It was in order to prevent a global warming catastrophe, and therefore handpicked certain people, like via this nanotech to survive.  

Matt:   40:58
Wow.  

Brandon:   40:59
Yep, which -

Matt:   41:00
Just let that hang there for a moment.  

Brandon:   41:02
Wait. I have  questions.

Erin:   41:05
Yeah, hold on for one second because I have, like, two more sentences.  

Brandon:   41:09
Oh good.  

Erin:   41:09
So some people are worshipping Black Swan as a God now that everyone's awake again, which is great. No red flags there/

Matt:   41:17
Rightly so! I would, wouldn't you?

Erin:   41:19
Yeah, and Black Swan also tells them that they're going to worship Shana and her kid, which is great news. And she realizes that if she tells them about all of the stuff that she's come to know partially from being inside of Black Swan, they'll hate her and also her kid, so she can't. And Nessie, who's been like, deeply influenced by Black Swan as well - it's kind of unclear if it's still fully Nessie and she's just completely bought into Black Swan, or Black Swan has taken over her in some way - she basically promises that Shana, like, "you'll come around to this eventually," and then the book ends!  

Matt:   41:51
Right. You'd think that a book with 800 pages could have had a more satisfying ending.  

Erin:   41:57
Yeah, and I don't know, maybe Chuck Wendig is writing a sequel.

Matt:   42:00
That's what has got to be. That's what it says to me that there's definite sequel potential there.

Erin:   42:05
I did like a brief Google search, I didn't do a deep dive, I didn't see anything about it. But, like, how do you not - that's not an ending, Chuck!

Brandon:   42:12
We - are we calling out Chuck Wendig, is that what we're about to do?

Matt:   42:15
I think that's what happened, I think that's what we have done. Yeah, whether we like it or not, we'll see if that makes it to the final cut. Chuck.

Brandon:   42:25
You gotta be courageous with the podcast at some point.

Erin:   42:26
This is the time to take risks.

Brandon:   42:31
I mean, it's like 800 pages, like this is already three books. He doesn't need to write another one.

Erin:   42:36
I know! But also how do you end a novel like that?

Brandon:   42:38
Maybe he just stopped. Maybe he reached page 800 and was like, "eh, I'm good."  

Matt:   42:46
Honestly, though, I think you might be right, because it ended so abruptly.

Erin:   42:51
Yeah, yeah, but you had questions.

Brandon:   42:53
I have many questions. The one that occurred to me, that the end was, so Black Swan predicts an extinction level event.  

Erin:   42:59
Yeah.  

Brandon:   42:59
Is global warming the extinction level event that it predicts that it's trying to stop? Or climate change, I guess.

Erin:   43:05
I guess. Yeah, I'm not sure to what extent it was trying to - if it was telling the truth about, there was an extinction level event, and it was preventing the climate change apocalypse, so that's why it started this. Or if it was just straight up lying about the diseases that all of the to begin with.  

Matt:   43:21
Well, that's just it, right? It seems, at the very least, that it was a little bit misleading you with the information that is shared to our protagonists. And that makes me question the ethical standing of this AI/God.

Erin:   43:40
Yeah, I mean, definitely it kind of reveals itself at the end there to have been the antagonist the whole time.

Brandon:   43:45
Yeah, exactly, like are we just a experiment to this thing? Is...

Erin:   43:49
Yeah, I don't know, I guess?

Matt:   43:51
A successful one, in any case.

Brandon:   43:53
Is it though? 

Matt:   43:53
We survived a little bit.

Erin:   0:00
A little bit.  

Matt:   0:00
Some of us.  

Erin:   43:58
It was interesting, too, because the whole time, I was like, well, if Black Swan can communicate with itself in the past, why didn't it just do something to stop this disease from ever coming into play. 

Matt:   44:07
Well, that's the problem with any time travel sci-fi, that you get.

Brandon:   0:00
Yeah, that's it.  

Erin:   44:12
I spent the whole novel being like, oh, like the time travel in this doesn't work at all. But then at the end it was like, okay, I was being deliberately misled about what that was involved, was time travel, even a factor? Or did Black Swan just decide in the current time of like, oh, we're heading towards global warming, so I'm gonna wipe all these humans out.

Matt:   44:29
Very good point.

Brandon:   44:30
Maybe.

Erin:   44:31
Have you read any of "The Stand" by Stephen King?

Brandon:   44:34
I have not. But I know this gets compared to "The Stand."

Erin:   44:37
Yeah, because that was gonna - like I haven't read the book, so that was gonna be my question of like, either of you have any Stand comparisons?

Brandon:   44:45
I wish.

Erin:   44:45
But that's a problem with Stephen King's books, is that nobody edits him anymore and hasn't since, like, the mid 80's, at least.

Brandon:   0:00
Yeah.  

Matt:   44:54
So what you're saying is, this is a book where nothing was taken out, everything, every idea, good or bad, was just thrown in there. And that's why this book is 800 pages of - of - jeez.

Brandon:   45:09
Content?  

Matt:   45:10
That's exactly the word I was looking for, thank you.

Erin:   45:14
I was just gonna say, like, I don't disagree that like, there's so many characters in this book and there's so many some plots that don't actually go anywhere at the end of it.

Brandon:   45:24
Yeah, you know, like, my - what I've read in the past, the closest thing that I could compare this to was Michael Crichton. Like it, as I was first starting I was like, this feels like "Andromeda Strain" or "Jurassic Park" because it's kind of science-y, but not total science.

Erin:   45:36
Yeah.

Brandon:   45:38
But then all of a sudden it started to veer in all these different directions. And I'm like, if it were Michael Crichton, this book would have been a fraction of the size and probably a lot stronger. Uh, sorry Chuck..

Erin:   45:48
I've liked a lot of Chuck Wendig's other stuff, like I liked his Star Wars trilogy, I like, I've read some of the Blackbird series and I've liked that. And I didn't - like parts of this book, like I said, parts of it I did find very emotionally compelling. It's just so long.

Brandon:   46:04
And dense.

Erin:   46:04
And dense! And very unhappy for so many parts like there were - it's like, it's kind of rare that I'm distressed by a book, and I was distressed by this book.  

Matt:   46:14
I was gonna say, when did you read it? Like during -

Erin:   46:16
I was...

Matt:   46:16
What period?

Erin:   46:17
I think it was early January that I read it?

Matt:   46:21
Okay.

Erin:   46:21
Or mid January, maybe. It was definitely before...

Matt:   46:24
It was pre-COVID-19 comes to North America.

Erin:   46:26
It was pre-COVID-19 comes to North America for sure.

Matt:   46:29
Right. Because I think that's that's essential, if we're gonna think about this book, if we're gonna analyze this book, we cannot ignore the moment in history that we're in, the reason why this book is so topical and so scary, and so - I don't know. I liked it, for what it's worth, I really enjoyed it. Given the context, I'm not surprised that you felt a little bit of anxiety here.

Erin:   46:50
Yeah, and it was - I think some of the violence was very excessive. There's a lot of gun violence, there's a lot of sexual violence, that I've skimmed over in my summary just cause like, wanna keep podcast a bit light, right? That I felt like didn't really add anything necessarily, but just made me feel unhappy with what I was reading. In a way that wasn't just, oh,, like bad things are happening to the characters, that it felt kind of unnecessary and sort of just trying to have a shock value part to it, which I never love.

Brandon:   47:19
Yeah, I find that's tough with this kind of novel, when it is very like scientific discovery, we have a mystery to solve sort of plot. I think the temptation is there to add in those moments of - I'll call it action, even though it's often just violence - to kind of break up the investigation, if that make sense.

Erin:   47:35
Yeah, yeah, and that felt like it was trying to be this thing that was dark and gritty, which is fine, although it was also trying to be very hopeful. And I know that was one the reviews that I saw of it a lot, that it was like a very hopeful look at things. And like a distance in some regards, a book about people coming together and people trying to help each other, like there is quite a bit of that in the novel.

Brandon:   47:55
Right.

Erin:   47:55
Most of it not plot-related.  

Brandon:   47:56
Yeah.

Erin:   47:56
But even just little bits of the social media interspersions that you get. Like there was one that I found genuinely touching that was a post from Tumblr of somebody saying like, "I'm going to keep the fan fiction archives running as long as I can." It was just like a very deeply human moment.

Matt:   48:14
Personal.

Brandon:   48:15
What ends up happening to like Internet and social media? Like, obviously, it falls apart at some point, I'm guessing.

Erin:   48:19
Yeah, I don't know that we get a super in depth look at what happens to it. I think like most things, it just kind of stops running once there are no longer people there to run it.

Brandon:   48:28
Right.  

Erin:   48:28
And the idea that, like, maybe it will return someday.

Brandon:   48:32
Yeah, if we want it to.

Erin:   48:34
Yeah. Yeah.  

Matt:   48:35
Vague hopefulness.

Erin:   48:37
Yeah, that's I guess, the idea of getting to like, rebuild society in a weird way. And we've been talking about some of the like issues that you had with the book, and I mean that I have with the book too, I'm wondering, like, what was it that actually made you stop reading?

Matt:   48:51
So curious.

Brandon:   48:53
Honestly, I was probably page 200, 225, there had already been so much story that I was like, I'm looking at this book, I'm like, how the hell is this book going to continue for another 600 pages?  

Erin:   49:03
Yeah.  

Brandon:   49:03
It's so dense with trying to explore this infection and trying to solve this, and to me, it was reading very much like a Michael Crichton book, but with a much slower pace. That's - I was - I just got bored, and I find - and I think this is my own interest these days as a reader, this was way before COVID and stuff going on right now, but I find I'm less interested in characters where their lives are full of angst and their lives are horrible. You know, full sympathy towards Shana and her sister and her idiot dad. But, like, I don't like, I want to see, you know, something that doesn't start out quite so dim. If that makes sense.

Erin:   49:39
Yeah. And also like the note it ended on, too, like, I think it could have turned around for me in a big way if it had ended more hopefully. But because you get that big drop at the end of, actually, Black Swan did all this and like, killed all these people and everything is kind of terrible. We've survived the apocalypse, but now people are worshipping Black Swan and Shana's in this very weird situation, she has a kid now, but the kid's maybe being worshipped - like that was just such a weird note to end things on that I found it hard to like connect with the story looking back to it. Cause, I mean, the whole story matters, but I think it does matter what note you end things on.

Brandon:   50:18
Absolutely. And like based on everything you described, like for the rest of the book, I'm surprised that people are calling it hopeful. I wouldn't call this, especially in this age where we're seeing, like, Hope Punk and Solar Punk becoming more of a thing. I wouldn't call this Hope Punk.  

Erin:   50:30
No.

Brandon:   50:31
Based on what you told me, like this sounds like just straight up post-apocalyptic, maybe even bordering on like dystopian if it's supposed to carry on to more of the story.

Erin:   50:38
Yeah, well, and if you compare it to other things that are considered to be Hope Punk, like I'm thinking specifically of, like, the Broken Earth trilogy, which, as listeners may or may not be familiar with, is N.K.  Jemisin's big important trilogy. It's also an apocalyptic story, but that, I think, is Hope Punk in a bigger way, like it's more about community, it's more about trying to rebuild post-apocalypse, and has a lot more depth around like reconnecting and like repairing things afterwards. 

Matt:   51:06
No, this is squarely post-apocalyptic for me. I mean, considering there, 1% of humanity has survived a massive viral infection. Governments and the Internet have completely collapsed, and a fraction of humanity is worshiping an artificial intelligence, right? That's pretty cut and dry. That's not a hopeful finish.

Erin:   51:30
Yeah, and as soon as I was finished, I was like, wait a second, were the bad guys kind of right? Because, like, all throughout the book, Ozark - they're very much on, like, "the walkers air bad, something bad is happening here," and you're meant to sympathize with the walkers, sympathize with Shana. And not that I think that's wrong, necessarily. But then at the end, I was like, wait a second, but were they right? Because I do not now want to be agreeing with this group of white supremacist militia! But also it was kind of bad!

Brandon:   52:00
The problem with that sort of story too where, in the end, you can't pick anybody's side, like I want to able to pick somebody side and route for them. Know that I've at least picked somebody who, even if everybody's gonna agree with them, at least I can.

Erin:   52:10
Yeah, and like, not that the characters were necessarily at fault, like the walkers and Shana weren't necessarily at fault for what they were doing, but it still just had this weird taste lingering in terms of like, "Wait, what have I read?" What? Who?

Brandon:   52:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erin:   52:26
Like, were they right along? Cause I'm deeply uncomfortable with that implication.

Matt:   52:29
Seems like they kind of were, which is interesting. 

Erin:   52:35
Yeah, which, like, it wasn't satanic. And that's the thing of like, I know, Chuck Wendig's politics are, like, very left wing. So I don't think he meant for you to end the book and be like, "wait a second, were the white supremacists right".

Brandon:   52:47
I'd be very surprised if that was his -   

Erin:   52:49
I too would be very surprised, because I don't think that was his intention at all. But it is kind of like, wait, why is that what I'm coming away from - like wondering, not if they were right, because obviously they did a lot of bad things, but should they have been taking more action to actually stop that? Have I've been rooting for the wrong thing this whole time? Which I don't love coming out of a story.

Brandon:   53:11
No.  

Matt:   53:11
Well, just going off of that about the reversal of the perspectives for the antagonist and protagonist, I was trying to nail down what the arc was, what the story was here. And it's very hard to nail down what the specific story trope is in this novel, because there so many of them, you know, is this the protagonist turns out they're maybe not the most ethical and the antagonist is the good guy all along. Is that one of those? It's hard to nail down.

Erin:   53:42
And there's too many characters to really nail down, like none of them do, like, a lot of growing either, through the story. Like most of them - I mean Matthew goes through a significant amount of trauma and then growth, but...

Matt:   53:53
Oh, poor Matthew.

Erin:   53:55
But like for the most part, most them don't change significantly. And they're just kind of there. Like I said, that was sort of my struggle in summarizing it of trying to piece together all these things that kind of happen and like characters that I liked, like I like Marcy and I like Pete Corley really well, I think they're interesting characters, but also they're just kind of there for a lot of the plot.

Brandon:   54:16
Yeah.

Erin:   54:16
And also like, lots of the stories don't get resolved, which I was super frustrated about. Like we never get resolution on Pete Carlie's family. We actually get like, really early in the book, close to when he's introduced, he has a phone call with his wife where she's like kind of an interesting person, like obviously, their relationship isn't ideal, but she gets a name and they have kind of a funny conversation. But then we never hear anything about her again. And I'm like, but I kind of care about what happened to her? And I care about what the end of his journey was because that was his whole arc, but we never had a resolution to that. And like Matthew's wife just kind of disappears. And his son, I think, dies off screen of the illness. And it's like, all right, I'm glad I invested time and energy into caring about this plot line.

Matt:   55:00
And, you know, on that note, Erin, I actually have a question for you. And a question for you both, actually, you're both writers is perfect. You've told me before, Erin, authors don't include things in their stories unless it serves a purpose. You know, they don't include something, a detail, in a story unless it does something. Do you think that was the case here, or do you think the editors were a little too shy? A little too...

Brandon:   55:25
I think that really, really, strong writing, like if you mention something, it's because it'll come up later, like you don't include anything unless it's relevant. In most cases. Every once in a while you're gonna throw a detailed just because it's fun and or it's something kind of wacky and interesting about the world. But I, of course, like the way I write, and the way I teach my students, is, don't put anything in unless it's necessary. Yeah, so reading something like this, I think like, anything that doesn't get resolved by the end, anything that doesn't end up staying relevant, or even just being relevant for a part of it, to me is an issue. And it is kind of weak because to me, that's one of the things you learn very early as a writer is, I'm not gonna throw random. Not everything needs to be resolved. But yeah main points of the story should be resolved by the end.

Erin:   56:05
Yeah, and like, I think maybe there's an argument to be made on the other side that in the real world, not everything gets a resolution. But at the same time, like I'm reading a story, I'm not - like I live in the real world, I know that. But when I'm reading a story, I kind of expect it to resolve things, at least to some degree, like it's okay if not everything does get a resolution. But I at least want there to be something there a little bit more than what I was getting from some of the plots in this.  

Matt:   56:33
Right.

Brandon:   56:34
Yeah.

Erin:   56:34
And, like specifically with regard to like, it's a pretty basic law of like, set up and pay off.  

Erin:   56:40
right,  

Erin:   56:40
Like if you see something up, you should pay it off. And there were things that were not paid off but were set up quite a bit, which is the frustrating piece, which is like, oh, if you didn't spend a lot of time on the set up, then that's fine, I guess, but you did, and then you didn't resolve it.

Brandon:   56:56
I think that's part of the reason why I start to get turned off by the novel very early, I think it was right around the time that we were introduced to Matthew, because the set up that I got to the beginning of the novel was that, you know, this is a story, it's gonna focus on Shana and Benji, it's gonna be very, like, investigative science-focused, there's some sort of plague lake illness going on that's going to be focused on. All of a sudden we're spending all this time with Matthew, and this story totally veers into something else. I'm like okay, what novel am I reading now? And I think it's a broken promise to the reader, I think, which is a huge issue, as a writer.  

Erin:   57:25
Yeah.

Brandon:   57:25
Unless you get to a point in your career where you could get away with breaking promises to your readers.

Erin:   57:32
Even then, I think you have to be kind of careful with that. If you're gonna break a promise to a reader, you should have a purpose behind it. And I don't know that there was a purpose to breaking that promise. I don't necessarily think that Matthew's story is like a bad one, but if you set the story up in a certain way that readers are not expecting that, I don't know that his story makes up for that broken promise, or like, that it says anything about reader expectations or anything like that.

Matt:   57:58
Well, again that that perfectly segues in my next question, which was, do you think that the writing suffered because of those broken promises, because of those loose threads not tied up?  

Erin:   58:08
I mean, I think it definitely does, to a certain extent. Like I said, I felt very unsatisfied by the end of the novel. Like I ended things just being like, wait, what, that was - that's it? Like that - and immediately I was like, is there, does he have a sequel planned, like what do you mean that we're just not going to get answers on this, kind of thing. And again, like, not giving answers can be used well in stories, it's just that in this case, I was frustrated by it, like you said, like a broken promise to the reader.

Matt:   58:37
Well, that's why I assumed that there was gonna be sequel after you finished, because there are so many loose ends. What do you think, Brandon?

Brandon:   58:42
Having not finished the novel, I don't - it sounds like the broken promises hurt the novel. I think if I had made it to the end, I would have been very unsatisfied. Honestly, if of writer breaks promises for me - and to me as a reader, breaks too many of them, I'm then less inclined to check out the next thing, like I've been a fan of some of Chuck Wendig's other work, if the next book that comes out is a sequel to this, or is something as long - unless we're doing another podcast, I'm probably not going to check it out.

Erin:   59:10
Well, maybe!

Brandon:   59:10
I think that's the risk about broken promises, I think you alienate readers, and I think that would have alienated me even further.

Erin:   59:16
I was trying to think of a good example of, like, a broken promise, and then I looked across to my bookshelf and I see Jade City sitting over there and that I feel like was a bit of a broken promise. And we haven't talked about Jade City, so no spoilers.

Matt:   59:27
We haven't even gotten there yet, that's what I'm saying, that's on the list.

Erin:   59:30
It's on the list, I think we're gonna do it soon. But that, I think, is a good example of a broken promise to a reader.

Brandon:   59:35
Interesting.

Matt:   59:36
Any, any elaboration on that, or?

Erin:   59:40
I don't know - and not like a huge broken promise. But just in that they set something up that you think is going to be a big deal, and then it's a subversion of your expectations of where the story is going to go.

Brandon:   59:51
For which character?

Erin:   59:52
The oldest brother?  

Brandon:   59:53
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Erin:   59:55
I don't know what your experience of reading the book was, but my expectation, and then where they took that character, was different than what I was expecting.

Brandon:   1:0:03
Yeah, I hear that. Yeah, because they set him up in a very particular way.  

Erin:   1:0:07
Yes. And -

Brandon:   1:0:08
They, I mean Fonda Lee.  

Erin:   1:0:11
Yes, Fonda Lee, she has a name.

Brandon:   1:0:11
Yeah, Fonda sets it up - yeah, that's a good point, I  could see that.

Erin:   1:0:14
And like I said, maybe I just landed on that because it is sitting right at eye level on my shelf. But like, that, I think, is a good example because they do it, it's a subversion, and it works. And it throws what you were expecting out the window, but it's okay because that gives the story an opportunity to expand in a new way.

Brandon:   1:0:30
Yeah, you know, what's one that I - I'm looking at my bookshelf now - I don't know if this will count as a broken promise or not. Let me know what you think. So, I've been reading "The Black Iron Legacy" by Gareth Hanrahan. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his last name properly, but, so, it starts off with this novel, "The Gutter Prayer." "The Shadow Saint" came out, like within the last couple of months, I think. You know, it's second world fantasy. "The Gutter Prayer" focuses on three main protagonists with a bunch of side characters throughout this novel, and you get a very clear arc for the three of them by the end of that first novel. You go into the second book and to me, when you when I'm reading a series like this, I expect the main protagonists to carry over - they don't.  

Erin:   1:1:05
Yeah.  

Brandon:   1:1:05
All the setting is still the same but the focus is, for the most part, with a couple of exceptions, on other main protagonists and your key protagonists from the first one are much more secondary characters. Which, to me, is not quite a broken promise, but you're - all of a sudden, you're changing things on the reader. And I was totally fine with it of anything I enjoyed the second book even more.

Erin:   1:1:24
Oh, interesting. Yeah, it depends, I guess, on how that delivery happens.  

Brandon:   1:1:30
Yeah, absolutely.

Erin:   1:1:30
And if it was done for a purpose, that feels legitimate.

Brandon:   1:1:34
Yeah, which in this case, it did.

Matt:   1:1:35
But based on the based on the reaction that we got earlier, it sounds like the delivery in "Wanderers" was not based on legitimate reasons.

Erin:   1:1:44
Yeah, I don't know, like, because I think having some realism is maybe a legitimate reason. I don't know if it's just that the delivery wasn't there for me.

Brandon:   1:1:53
I wonder if because you mentioned Broken Earth trilogy before, I - like I love Broken Earth Trilogy, it's one of my favourite series that I've read in a long time, and one of the benefits of trilogy like that is, because it's set in another world, you can kind of mix things up. And I think setting it in our world, because our world is pretty screwed up these days, I think it would be tough to present a story like Wanderers set in what is essentially the present day and not explore some of that darkness? I don't you could present it totally rosy, you had - you would have least go somewhere in the middle, just chose to go a little bit further into the darkness, which is legit, I think. Based on [unintelligible]

Matt:   1:2:28
Very good point.

Erin:   1:2:29
Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a distinction to be made between, like, where I did not enjoy aspects of the story, and whether or not they were objectively poor storytelling choices. Which is, you know, another question.

Brandon:   1:2:41
Totally. I don't know if I have the balls to question all of Chuck Wendig's choices.

Erin:   1:2:47
Chuck  Wendig is a much more successful writer than either of us, so I'm like, he must be doing something right.

Brandon:   1:2:53
Given everything that was on the back cover of this book with all these accolades like clearly he did some great in there. Maybe I'm the problem. I will say this, I really wanted to enjoy it. I tried really, really hard because it fits - kind of the main plot, at least, at the start, fits a lot of what I loved when I was first getting into science fiction like Michael Crichton, as I mentioned before, and I really wish I could have kept going with this. I just got bored out and beaten up. I feel bad about it, but...

Erin:   1:3:19
I do have one question of like, having read, you know, half of the book. How do you feel - or, maybe not quite that much, but -

Brandon:   1:3:24
Don't be generous.  

Erin:   1:3:27
A third?

Brandon:   1:3:29
274, I don't even, I thought it was the third, but - 

Erin:   1:3:31
We won't do the math on that, it's fine. But how do you feel about how things progressed, like, does it feel like it went wildly off the rails based on...?

Brandon:   1:3:42
Oh, yeah. It's like you were describing three totally different novels. Like...

Erin:   1:3:48
That's kind of what it feels like to read, too.

Brandon:   1:3:50
Yeah, I never would have predicted that it went in that direction because you mentioned nanites and I hadn't gotten to the point where it turns out to be nanites, and I'm like, okay, nanites are cool, what's causing the nanites? Wait, wait, but there's another disease? But wait, there's white supremacists? But - was it Marcy, right?  

Erin:   1:4:07
Yeah.  

Brandon:   1:4:08
Marcy can see - did we ever get to figure out why she could see stuff?

Erin:   1:4:11
Yeah, it's explained that there's some sort of frequency coming off the nanobots that somehow resonate with, like, the - she's got like a...

Matt:   1:4:19
Plate?

Erin:   1:4:19
Plate, yeah, plate in her head.

Brandon:   1:4:21
Ahh, okay.

Erin:   1:4:22
And they somehow resonate with the plate in her head that make it so that her symptoms of like brain injury are a lot better. I don't know if the science on that checks out.

Brandon:   1:4:33
Probably not.

Erin:   1:4:34
But that's sort of the explanation that's given.

Matt:   1:4:40
I wanted to just point out, because I would be upset if I didn't point out, that this book is a perfect example of why this podcast exists. It is a book that is egregiously long, that our main host struggled to get through, that our guest, who is himself a writer, could not get through, that we have painstakingly summarized and analyzed here for you today. Right? That's what this show is all about, especially given that it's topical and that there's a sequel coming soon.  

Erin:   0:00
Well...maybe.

Matt:   0:00
No? Was that not confirmed?

Erin:   0:00
No!  

Matt:   0:00
Oh, sh*t. I mean, if you believe!  

Brandon:   0:00
Imagine if the sequel is like 300 pages.  

Erin:   0:00
Oh my -  

Brandon:   0:00
Or it's like a novella.  

Erin:   0:00
Oh, yeah, yeah, and I think that about wraps up our discussion. So if this talk of apocalypses and disease and pandemics has got you down, next week, we will be picking up with...a not at all lighter book, The Poppy War by R. F Kuang.

Matt:   0:00
Right, I've been waiting for this one for so long for reasons that I will go into in the next episode. So stay tuned,

Erin:   0:00
But, um, dark in completely different ways, I think I can say with some degree of confidence. Brandon is just shaking his head at me. 

Brandon:   0:00
It's not lighter at all.

Erin:   0:00
It's not lighter at all. I know. I'm sorry. After that, I promise we will...

Matt:   0:00
Do you? Do you promise? Be careful.

Erin:   0:00
I'm not sure if that's a promise I can keep.

Matt:   0:00
No, breaking promises to the readers. Bingo!

Brandon:   0:00
Nice.

Matt:   0:00
Bringing it back. There you go.  

Erin:   0:00
Anyway. Thanks again so much, Brandon, for joining us. I don't know if you want to plug your own stuff, but -

Matt:   0:00
Please do.

Brandon:   0:00
Sure, no, thank you, this was a blast, I was happy to come on and chat. Depending on when this drops, we may have just released, on the podcast that I do with Evan May, Broadcasts From The Wasteland, @BFTWPodcast on Twitter, we're releasing a virtual reading event, in light of the fact that literary events have kind of been post-poned indefinitely. We put together a bunch of recordings of authors reading their work to kind of mimic a reading night. So we're calling that the "No One's Alone Reading Series", that should be out, or about to come out, by the time this airs. And then there's obviously Broadcasts From The Wasteland itself, season one, with season two coming soon, if you like podcasts.

Erin:   0:00
Yeah, it's a really cool podcast, and I'm actually guest starring on a couple of episodes of season two, so if you like listening to me and Brandon talk, maybe you should check that out.

Brandon:   0:00
Which you should. I don't understand why you wouldn't.

Erin:   0:00
It's a good podcast, it's a lot of talking about books and writing, and sort of rambling with other writerly people, so that's always really fun.

Matt:   0:00
Perfect for our audience.

Erin:   0:00
Yeah, exactly.

Brandon:   0:00
Yeah, I think our working tagline is "eavesdropping on writers in the hotel bar."

Matt:   0:00
Love it.  

Erin:   0:00
You know what? That's not a bad description of what the episodes are like.  

Brandon:   0:00
It's basically what - we have no script.  

Erin:   0:00
I know, I've been a guest. We talked for hours about Batman.  

Brandon:   0:00
We did, it was so much fun!  

Erin:   0:00
It was great.  Anyway, in the meantime, if you want to reach us, I'm Erin Rockfort, @pineapplefury on Twitter.

Matt:   0:00
And I'm Matt Thomas, and you cannot reach me.  

Erin:   0:00
And thanks so much for tuning in, and we will catch you next time.  

Matt:   0:00
Catch ya next time, thanks, folks. Podcast golden age!  

:   1:8:08