Peter Heller’s new COVID-era thriller ‘The Guide’ will fill you with dread, in the best way

A COVID-19-era thriller will sound like either the best or worst thing to read right now, depending on your disposition. But if you’re of a darker, more contemplative frame of mind, there’s something cathartic about Peter Heller’s latest novel, “The Guide” (Knopf, 272 pp., ★★★ out of four), an ever so subtly dystopian wilderness noir that speculates on the horrors of a post-pandemic society.

Twenty-something Jack arrives at Colorado’s fancy, five-star Kingfisher Lodge midseason, hired to help its posh clientele find the biggest, juiciest fish along a stretch of river known as Billionaire’s Mile while they seek seclusion and distraction from disease. Readers may remember Jack from Heller’s 2019 book “The River,” though having read it is not essential to understanding “The Guide.” Here, Jack stands on his own, an erudite and grief-haunted cowboy with a Dartmouth education, a taste for 17th-century haiku poetry and a past in need of forgetting.

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He also has a nose for deceit, and he quickly senses something fishy (pardon the pun) going on at the lodge. Jack has been hired to replace a guide who didn’t work out, but it’s not entirely clear why his predecessor left. The lodge is locked behind a heavy gate that requires a key code to get in and, strangely, out. He’s warned about a trigger-happy neighbor with a scoped rifle upstream, inclined to shoot at anyone who steps foot on his property, and Jack soon confirms said neighbor is always watching. Patrons go out for the day and come back to the bar looking shaken, some with Band-Aids on the backs of their hands.

And then Jack hears a sharp scream deep in the night. “Was it a barn owl?” he wonders. “They sound some nights like a woman being murdered.”

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Jack finds an unlikely partner in uncovering the lodge's mysteries – and an unlikely romantic match – in his fishing ward, Alison K, a famous but surprisingly earthy singer who knows her way around a fishing pole and who also can’t leave well enough alone. As the inconsistencies and warning signals pile up, the kindred spirits team up to figure out what's going on.

The enticing mystery keeps the pages turning, but not too quickly. “The Guide” is too beautifully written to speed through it, the descriptions of nature lush and vivid. Rarely has fishing felt so poetic, tying a lure so much like art. But suddenly the spell of Colorado’s unspoiled wilderness is broken by the presences of a contactless thermometer or quarantine center.

Heller doesn’t much need to use the word "COVID" to evoke the virus’ specter. He peppers the text with unsettlingly subtle references to the pandemic – a casual observation of masks being worn or not in public here, an allusion to outbreaks there, a passing mention of “the superbug that finally broke out of India.” The dread mounts, but so too does the intrigue – and the sexual tension.

Perhaps the ending offers too tidy a resolution. To ask readers after the past year to still believe it’s possible for good to conquer evil is a tall order. But then making a cautionary tale on the widening divide between the haves and have nots in the era of COVID-19 go down so smooth is a tall order too, and Heller accomplishes that nicely.

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