Book Review: False Dawn

© 1979 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Look at this book cover. Take a long, close look at it.

Now imagine you’re Hopper, age 12. Is this book cover not the awesomest thing you’ve ever seen in your life??!!??!!

So back in those halcyon days of the late 70s, those dark days of Jimmy Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, what better way to escape the televised miasma than to read dystopian fiction? Aye, that is what I did. But mainly I did it because of that cool book cover.

False Dawn is basically a tale of the zombie apocalypse without the zombie. And Ms. Quinn keeps it all hidden, which I liked. We don’t know what caused this particular apocalypse, the societal breakdown, though it has to do somehow with chemicals. Animals have mutated. Foliage has mutated. And human beings have mutated too, to varying, sometimes disgustingly graphic degrees. Great fodder for the adolescent male brain. Our heroine, for example, has membranes that cover her eyes during times of extreme stress. Our hero has an arm cut off that regrows during the first third of the novel.

Thea and Evan, our aforementioned mutant heroes, are trekking cross the harsh brutal landscape of what was once Midwest America, carefully avoiding rabid wolves, lethal water spiders, cannibals, and Negan’s Saviors – ah, the Pirates, I mean, ruthless gangs of thugs terrorizing those who want to create better lives for themselves. Big secret revealed early on is that Evan was once the leader of the Pirates, a Negan-gone-good, and he grows a fondness for scarred loner Thea as they both make headway for a fabled town called Gold Lake, a land of milk and honey where there’s no big bad chemicals.

I kid, but I dug it, both back then and now during a quick re-read forty years later. Thought about lending it to Patch but there are a couple of sexually delicate scenes which should have barred young me from reading the book, but will bar her. Overall, though, a nice decent semi-science fiction read.

Grade: A-minus.