‘The Dog Stars’ novelist Peter Heller / Remembering rock critic Dave Marsh

“I keep the beast running.” That’s the first line of Peter Heller’s novel The Dog Stars, which he wrote without knowing it would become a post-apocalyptic story. Heller, an experienced outdoorsman and expedition kayaker, wasn’t trying to write a survival thriller when he sat down at a coffee shop. He was trying to write something where he didn’t know what would happen next—a freedom his nonfiction work never gave him. The result was a bestseller about two men, a pilot and a gun nut, trying to stay alive after a virus has wiped out most of humanity. The novel has now been adapted into a film by Ridley Scott, opening in theaters next week. On the same episode of Fresh Air, host Dave Davies also remembered rock critic Dave Marsh, who died at 76, by replaying portions of Terry Gross’s 1987 and 1993 interviews with him.

The Novelist: Survival as Interior Landscape

Peter Heller came to the apocalypse honestly. He told Dave Davies that he spends breakfasts with a paleobotanist friend who studies the K-T boundary—the geologic layer marking the dinosaur extinction. They talk about the sixth mass extinction currently underway and imagine what it will look like when the unraveling reaches human society. So when Heller sat down to write his first novel, those themes were already central to his thinking.