How High We Go in the Dark

A Plague from the Ice

A team of Arctic researchers discovers an ancient child frozen in the Siberian permafrost — and with her, a virus that has been locked in ice for millennia. The virus spreads. It targets children. It produces a plague that reshapes the world: its demography, its culture, its economy, its emotional landscape. The specific horror of a disease that kills the young before the old — reversing the expected sequence of loss — produces a grief that has no cultural script.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel begins here, in the near future, and moves through time: stories set decades and centuries hence, in the aftermath and the long wake of the Arctic Plague. The linked stories share characters connected by relationship and lineage, imagery that recurs and transforms, and a central emotional question: how do people — individually, collectively, across generations — survive loss of this scale and this kind?

How High We Go in the Dark was written across a decade, finishing just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Published in early 2022, it arrived at a moment of collective grief that its premise had anticipated without predicting, and the resonances this created were complex: the book felt prophetic to some readers, too close to the bone for others, and necessary to both.

The Structure

The novel is structured as linked stories rather than chapters of a continuous narrative — a choice that reflects the material’s nature. Catastrophic loss is not experienced as continuous narrative; it is experienced in fragments, in moments, in individual lives that contain their particular grief without connecting smoothly to the grief of the person next to them.

Each story introduces new characters: a father who takes a job at a children’s “euthanasia theme park” — where terminally ill children can choose a last adventure before dying peacefully — after losing his daughter to the plague; a grief researcher who discovers that his dying mother’s recorded memories can be installed in his dogs; a hotel where the recently dead briefly appear to say goodbye to the living; an astronaut whose mission will take her to a planet humanity hopes to colonise, carrying genetic material from the dead.

The connections between these stories are not always explicit. A character from one story appears briefly in another. Imagery recurs — ice, descent, reaching upward — transforming in meaning as the collection accumulates. The effect is not of a novel with a plot but of a meditation with a subject: grief, love, persistence, and the specific human need to maintain connection with those who are gone.

The Euthanasia Theme Park

The book’s most audacious invention is the City of Laughter — a euthanasia theme park where families bring terminally ill children for a final, joyful day before a peaceful death. The premise sounds grotesque described baldly, and Nagamatsu does not flinch from the grotesquerie. But the story inhabits this space with the specific gravity that the best speculative fiction brings to impossible situations: it attends to the emotional reality of the people inside the scenario without allowing either sentimentality or horror to dominate.

The father who works at the City of Laughter is doing so, we gradually understand, as a form of proximity to his own dead daughter. He is not at peace; he is grieving, and grief requires this: to be near the thing that was lost, even in forms that are not the thing itself. The theme park — a space designed to make terminal illness bearable through imagination and play — becomes a figure for what all the stories are about: the human need to make the unbearable bearable through the creative transformation of reality.

Grief Across Time

What distinguishes Nagamatsu’s handling of collective catastrophe from most pandemic fiction is the temporal scope. The stories move forward through time — decades, then a century, then much further — and grief transforms as it moves. The acute, immediate loss of the early stories becomes cultural mourning, then historical memory, then something more distant: the grief that has become part of a civilisation’s DNA, shaping how people think about mortality and connection without their always knowing why.

The far-future sections are the most formally bold. An astronaut travels to a planet that humanity has decided to colonise, carrying not just biological material but the recorded memories and personalities of people from Earth — including people who died in the plague generations before. The question the story asks — what it means to carry the dead into the future, whether continuing their presence is a form of love or a refusal to let go — reconfigures everything that preceded it in the collection.

The Emotional Accumulation

How High We Go in the Dark is a book that becomes, over its course, more than the sum of its parts. Individual stories are not all equally successful: some feel more complete than others, some speculative premises more fully inhabited. But the accumulation of grief across its 300 pages produces an emotional effect that no individual story achieves — the sense of grief as a shared condition, a universal experience that takes different forms in different lives but that connects the people who carry it across time and distance.

The title comes from a story about researchers who, in the void of space, wonder how far the impulse to reach upward — toward stars, toward the transcendent, toward something beyond the losses that have accumulated — can carry them. The answer the book proposes is not a comforting one: grief does not resolve, connection does not simplify, the dead remain lost. But the reaching continues, and the reaching is, perhaps, the point.

Why This Matters

Published alongside a wave of pandemic fiction, How High We Go in the Dark distinguishes itself by the quality of its attention to grief as lived experience. Nagamatsu is not interested in catastrophe as spectacle or in resilience as a feel-good arc. He is interested in the specific texture of loss — the way it inhabits particular people in particular moments — and in what connects those particular losses across time.

The result is a book about grief that does not diminish grief into something manageable. It takes grief seriously as the appropriate response to irreplaceable loss, and it asks what a civilisation can become when it carries that kind of weight across generations.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A stunning debut that transcends its premise. The linked structure and temporal scope allow Nagamatsu to do something with pandemic grief that no single narrative could.