Book Review: Wanderers, Chuck Wendig, 2019

I was on the pre-orders train for Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers in 2019. I even still have the highway pin, shaped like an interstate highway sign (pictured above) awarded to some of us pre-order people.

By that time I’d read several of Wendig’s novels, and followed his blog regularly. Wanderers sounded like it was going to be the 21st century version of Stephen King’s The Stand, and I was ready for another epic end-of-the-world novel.

The book was in no way disappointing. It captured the zietgeist of the time, the first Trump era before the horrors of COVID-19. It was scary then, but rereading it in 2025, which I just did, is even scarier. The world of Wanderers was already suffused with the Trumpian hellscape, and now we’ve had a world-wide pandemic to top of it.

No science fiction/horror author actually sets out to make actual predictions, but Wendig did a fair job of it anyway. Not just the pandemic, but the right-wing desire to take over America and the accompanying co-opting of Christianity, the impact of climate change, the despair of America’s fly-over country is all in there. The conspiracies that fueled the right-wing reaction to COVID and the growing anti-vaccination movement are all illuminated in Wendig’s story.

Of course, we got through COVID, in a way. America as a whole is done with it, though it still kills thousands yearly. Mask mandates, or even mask encouragement, are frowned on by many Americans. The heroic efforts of the CDC is a central part of Wanderers. Though the agency stumbled during COVID, it overall weathered the storm, only to be gutted by Trump and Musk, its databases and programs reduced by a selfish and deluded group of politicians.

In Wanderers, of course, the plague is fatal to the overwhelming majority of humankind. White Mask, as it’s called, is cleverly designed by Wendig to have a long incubation period, and is therefore hard to detect and protect against. There’s no chance for masks or vaccines to work before civilization is wiped out, leaving only a few remnants, including a group protected by Black Swan, a benevolent artificial intelligence that appears to have nothing to do with Large Language Models.

I re-read Wanderers in anticipation of reading its sequel, 2022’s Wayward, which I’ll start in a week or two. It will be interesting to see what Wendig does with his survivors, and how he follows up on the themes explored in the first book.