The political situation in The Wanderers is perhaps something akin to if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016 and a healthier, more vigorous, but just as poisonous Trump were running against her in 2020. We don’t see much about how the rest of the world is dealing with White Mask, although we learn that it’s nothing good alternatively, the unraveling of American society is described in painful detail. His description of an American society in decline makes for some queasily scary reading. Because White Mask advances slowly and The Wanderers tracks the spread of the disease from patient zero, it takes a while for the world to wake up to the fact that it is in serious trouble.īecause Chuck Wendig uses multiple points of view to describe how the events of a devasting pandemic affect the U.S., comparisons can be easily drawn between Stephen King’s The Stand and The Wanderers. and heads west.Ī competing narrative is the advance of the plague of White Mask, a fungal disease that threatens humanity’s existence.

The wanderer flock and its shepherds begins on the East Coast of the U.S. They are accompanied by shepherds, the loved ones of those who have fallen into the sleepwalking state. Soon a crowd of sleepwalkers, or wanderers, develops. The sleepwalking girl is soon joined by others. She’s unable to wake up or stop walking, despite the efforts of her desperate sister and father. The Wanderers begins with a young girl, Nessie, who is caught in something like a sleepwalking trance. I began at the languid pace of a few chapters a day until full force of the peril facing the characters wormed its way into my brain, and the book threatened to take over my life because I couldn’t stop reading it. For me, this made my consumption of The Wanderers different from other recent apocalyptic adventures. The Wanderers starts slow, and a good part of its 800-page length elapses before the bulk of the the screaming and dying occur.

Wanderers chuck wendig summary