One of my favorite types of books are dismal tales about the future of humanity. They aren't all wonderful and in case you are more of a tl;dr sort of person, then just know that this is one of the ones that I thought was NOT wonderful. In fact, this book started to annoy me quite a lot about how the author seemed to be dragging out the story for the sake of having more pages. A vast majority of what happens in the book is completely unnecessary and flowery descriptions of things that could be entirely left out and adds very little to the overall story.
There are 5 or 6 major characters in this, and it reads like something that was written with the intention of being put onto a screen of some sort in the future. In this case I think the movie or series version of this story could actually be quite good, but the book itself annoyed me to the point where I just started scanning chapters around 50% of the way into the book's nearly 800 pages and I still ended up getting the entire story.
I read this as I tend to in Vietnam where there are virtually no books available in English: On my Kindle Paperwhite 2nd generation. If I had seen the physical copy of this book in all of its unnecessarily long glory, I probably would have passed it up.
It's not that I don't have the attention span or that I am stupid or anything like that. I have read Lord of the Rings in it's entirety as well as Gone with the Wind. I liked both of those despite their daunting length why? Because what happens in those tomes is almost entirely relevant to the story whereas in Wanderers it seems as though Chuck is making it long for the sake of making it long. I sighed out loud in my bed many times for how a chapter would just go on and on and on and on and it is clear that this information isn't important and doesn't really have anything to do with the actual story.
So what is the story? I'll do my best to avoid spoilers.
In modern times (they don't specify the year) a 15-year old girl that lives on a farm with her father and sister just starts walking away from the farmhouse in the morning. Her older sister sees this and follows her and notices that her eyes are glazed over and she is not responding to her name being called, she just trudges on and is focused on something in the distance, but the older sister named Shana continues to follow her and eventually grabs her to make her turn back. When she grabs her sister the sister who is walking becomes rigid and then starts to get really really hot to the point of burning Shana, who eventually lets her go. Then the younger sister who is trodding along resumes here walk into the distance. Shana doesn't have her phone but is afraid to let her sister, who she presumes is sleepwalking, out of her sight. A bit later on Shana spots her math teacher in the distance and calls to him for help only to discover that he too has glazed over eyes and starts walking beside her sister into the distance with no real objective in sight.
That part of the book was pretty interesting because it is ominous and scary and many other eventually join in to try to help and figure out what is going on with these "Wanderers" but no matter what the people, law enforcement, medical personnel, or even soldiers do they cannot stop the constant plodding along of this sort of zombie horde. The Wanderers are not interested in hurting anything, any barricade that is placed in front of them they climb over in an almost sort of Spiderman sort of way and later on we discover that trapping them results in disaster because they explode.
The Wanderers never speak, they never eat, they never use the bathroom, and they never sleep... for a very long time and Chuck uses this time to write about 750 additional pages that is mostly useless crap.
Another thing that really annoys me about this story is there is a bunch of teenage angst and a totally unnecessary love story built in there and this is a trick I have noticed in a lot of modern books so that they can perhaps attempt to capture the lucrative young-adult audience that would make these stories good screenplays or something like that, and this is where the real money is in literature.
There is also some modern issues that are preachy that are built into the story such as racism, white supremacy, and a bit of LGBT stuff and while I think that people can write about whatever they want, in these days this almost seems like bait to try to get Netflix interested in buying the rights. I don't care to get into that any more. I read it, I was fine with is, but Chuck starts to focus on that part of the story at times more than what the actual story is which is that there is a growing horde of robot zombie people that never stop walking towards nothing in particular that never have to sleep and cannot be harmed but only an be killed by making them explode.
If you think you can come up with ways that the group could be safely corraled or sedated, trust me, they cover all of this in the ridiculously long tome that is Wanderers.
I can ID a book that was written specifically to be turned into something on the big screen because they all seem to have a "teenagers and 20 somethings are the smartest and the adults are mostly just getting in the way!' sort of attitude about them. This has been true with several books and series of books that I have read recently. A lot of these did have the rights picked up and I just found out that Wanderers has been bought by Lionsgate and whatever the hell QC Entertainment is and this was purchased in 2019. Producers have already been named and as far as I can tell they intend to turn it into a series. Fine!
In the meantime though I feel as though this book will frustrate most readers because in retrospect, there just isn't really all that much interesting stuff that can come out of a non-violent group of armored human zombie things that are walking towards nothing in particular and never speak for years.
There's other stuff that happens in the book that leads to the downfall of humanity, because if that didn't happen this wouldn't be a dystopian book.
I am a huge fan of dystopian literature and have read all the classics such at the following
and many many others. I am constantly on the lookout for something new to fit into this but unfortunately after the massive success of The Hunger Games it seems like authors are following that same path with a slightly different story in the hopes that they too can get the $100 million that Suzanne Collins got for that story.
It's just disappointing to me that the writing often sort of seems formulaic now. This book was boring because it is too long and focuses on what appears to me as Chuck Wendig making a sales pitch to potential rights purchasers. It has worked so Good job Chuck!
I can't really recommend this book because even though it is my favorite genre, I got extremely bored with it due to the fact that this story could have been 200 pages instead of 800.
