Wayward by Chuck Wendig
(Del Rey, 2022)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the post-apocalyptic sequel to Wendig’s pandemic novel, The Wanderers, in which a fungal infection (‘White Mask’) rips through humanity, save for a fortunate few. These include the ‘Sleepers’, who are controlled by a nano-tech based A.I. called ‘Black Swan’ and, together with their protective ‘Shepherds’, are directed to a small town in Colorado where civilization is planned to begin anew. Wayward is the story of how that all goes horribly wrong.
As you might expect, many of the same characters appear here, including Shana whose baby, Charlie, is infiltrated by Black Swan’s nanoparticles. And it is when Charlie is born that cracks starts to appear in the idyll as the Sleepers start to behave like cult members, sequestrating the boy who begins to grow and develop at an alarming rate. Violence erupts when Shana attempts to get her child back with the help of her father figure, Benji, together with the town Sheriff, Marcy, and Matthew, the former preacher seeking redemption for his previous sins. As a result, Matthew is cast out and Benji and Shana decide to leave town rather than be co-opted into Black Swan’s designs. Their travels and travails constitute a major arc in the tale as they make their way across country towards the Centre for Disease Control HQ in Atlanta, where Benji used to work and where Black Swan was originally developed. There he hopes to find some way of neutralising the A.I. and ending its increasingly tyrannical rule. Along the road they are joined by their old friend, former ‘rock-god’ Pete Corley and their ‘band-of-heroes-struggling-against-the-odds’ quest gives Wendig the opportunity to proclaim the virtues of local, communitarian responses to civilization’s collapse.
Interleaved between and contrasting with these chapters is the continuing story of President Ed Creel, obviously based on a certain former-President, who is initially holed up through the pandemic with the country’s ‘elite’ in a luxury underground bunker. Here things also go awry, albeit for very different reasons, and with the help of a plot device that stretches credulity somewhat even for a story such as this, Creel escapes and joins forces once more with his Christofascist supporters. They too decide to march on the CDC, for reasons that are unclear even to Creel but are driven by the afore-mentioned plot device.
The inevitable showdown is explosive and blood-soaked, terminating the visceral trajectory with which the book begins. Much of this is appropriate, in context, but Wendig’s crude descriptions of Creel and company veer a little too far into caricature and are less striking as a result. It might have been more chilling to portray them as a cadre of smart looking young men carrying Tiki torches rather than a ragged band of mullet-haired, snaggle-toothed Confederate flag wavers. Elsewhere the book frequently lurches into mawkishness, as in the (thankfully short) chapters expressing the thoughts of the dog, ‘Good boy’ Gumball, who attaches himself to Marcy. Back in Colorado she remains a linchpin not just for the town as a whole but also for Shana’s sister Nessie, left acting as a substitute mother for Charlie, until her eyes are finally opened to Black Swan’s plans to re-shape humanity. Together she and Marcy give Benji and Shana the critical time they need to return and save the day, using Matthew as their crucial vessel, albeit not of the god he once worshipped. And so, after all the mud and gore is cleared away, a positive vision of the future emerges as the surviving protagonists separately find some measure of peace and security.
Despite the flimsy characterisations and the sentimentality—which does at least act as a counterpoint to the brutality of both Black Swan and Creel—Wendig certainly carries the reader along with an engaging style. Still, I can’t help but feel that with a little further editing it would have been that much more effective as a story and also less of a doorstop of a book.
Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.