False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Paperback, 228 pages
Published 1978, Babbage press reissue 2001
It is not just Philip K. Dick but I have a fondness for writers with Berkeley connections. It helps that I walked around that city connecting with the deep genre history. Those three words are something I associate with Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. She wouldn’t remember me but in 2014 I was on a panel about writing vampire fiction. At the time I had only my Chinese vampire novel Hunting the Moon Tribe, and CQY had written the longest-running vampire series ever. Since there are many multi-book Vampire series that is an accomplishment. (30 plus titles in the Saint-Germain series)
I was excited to sit next to her. I knew the honors she had piled up. I didn’t know that the Transylvanian Society of Dracula existed until they gave her a literary knighthood. In 2003 the World Horror Association declared her a Grand Master award, three years later the International Horror Guild named her a Living Legends, and another three years the HWA gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. She had to wait five years before she got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
I have always respected her work and output. I read many of her books before I started doing reviews. So this is the first time on this blog we have gotten down CQY style. With my reading leaning mostly towards Science Fiction, I had made the mistake of typecasting this author as an author of historical vampire fiction. My bad.
I was led to this novel by the anthology The Future is Female Vol 2. Edited by Lisa Yazsek. That book features a prequel short story to this novel, I love the story and ecological collapse novels are one of my serious nightmares. (I wrote my own – Ring of Fire from Deadite Press) In my podcast interview with Lisa, she compared False Dawn to one of my all-time favorite novels John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. SOLD.
That novel is so bleak I have had people curse me out for recommending it to them. It is great but That novel can make Cormac McCarthy feel like Disney. The thing is I like novels that are as Spinal Tap put it “Blacker than black.” This is bleaker than bleak and Yarbo in my opinion earned her Living Legend and horror grand master with this insanely grim ecological apocalypse novel alone.
Not for the light-hearted. If you don’t want the grimness ruined/spoiled take my word for it track down this novel and come back for some commentary. Again if you don’t like bleak novels this one is not for you. That is how amazing novels like this end up with angry one-star reviews.
False Dawn takes place a few decades after society collapsed from a series of pollution-related birth mutations. At the same time, ecological pressures begin to poison folks and everything falls apart. We follow Thea, a survivor who was pretty young when it all went down so all she knows is survival.
One of the great features of this novel is there is no sense ever that people are coming together to rebuild, or even put together a small community. People are fucked, they will stay fucked, and if you are lucky you might get a few weeks hiding in a house eating canned foods or hunting skinny, dying animals who are fewer and fewer in between. Hope is not a thing.
In the bleakest Meet-cute in the history of stories, Thea runs into a former pirate who is running away from his old gang with his gang-greening cut-off arm pinned to his jacket.
“She stood in the doorway looking down at him. “Why’d you keep it?”
He drew in a breath. “They were looking for a man with one arm. So I pinned this to my jacket. It’s going bad-I can’t use it much longer. He paused a moment, then finished, “I can’t get any further without help.”
Evan is a bit older, and was a parent who lost a wife and mutated baby before escaping Europe with the hopes that America was better off. At some point, he headed west and started a pirate gang trying to survive in the re-wilded California. This makes False Dawn a very California book. A depopulated California has become a harsh island of survival and outside of rumors the rest of the world might as well be Mars.
I have read many books set after the end of the world as we know it, more than any other False Dawn captures the suffering, and tortured battle for survival in this world. The horrors are also greater for a reader like me because outside of the random canned food the other thing they are eating, are the animals who are also slowly starving to death. Eating and hunting animals is a huge part of survival in this world so that adds a bleakness for this 30-year vegan. Dogs are also fighting for survival and not even close to man’s best friend anymore. There is something so gross about that loss of relationship, the novel doesn’t focus on that but the feeling is clear.
The first time we see any evidence of humans working together is not a cheery one either.
“Poor Bastards,” Evan muttered as he moved closer to the road. His eyes dwelled for a moment on the cart with the children, then he turned away. Even in the years when he lead the Pirates, he got used to the terrible deformities that were appearing more and more in the diminishing number of live births of the few surviving men and women. These children in the carts were no exception: Only one looked close to normal, all the other seven had defects ranging from a few extra fingers on each hand to hideously stunted bodies, to limbless trunks, to hornlike growth on lead-colored skin. Evan saw that two of the women were pregnant, and wondered, as he had done before, what could drive them to bear children with the hopelessly testimony of children riding in the cart.”
There is no going on for the human race. This cold reality hangs over the novel and makes this end-of-the-world novel extra dark. The bodies of the children who have the unfortunate luck of being born to carry the sins of the dark times when everyone thought they could have everything.
Thea as a character doesn’t exactly feel sorry for herself, this life is all she has ever known. Evan her traveling partner remembers when all went bad in the early 80s twenty years earlier. Thea is a victim of Rape, has never known love so as she and Evan survive together and they develop feelings she has no context for the closeness he desires. Thankfully he respects that throughout the story. Their travels have ups and downs even after trying on a dress one - this is one of Thea’s first light-hearted moments of joy we see and it is short-lived as CQY reminds us where we are in the next paragraph.
“The Bathroom was filthy, as Thea had thought it might be. Years of excrement clung to the toilet bowl and the smell, deadened by the cold, still hit Thea like a muffling blanket as she opened the door.”
On their travels they avoid the Pirates, even if Evan had been one of them it only serves to remind them of the cruelty. There is a weird aside when Thea and Evan find a strange cult of survivor monks. Who wants them to marry, Evan despite loving Thea tries to stand up to the monks. “You must not do this, Father. In your compassion” – he spat the word- “You cannot do this. She has been raped. That is the mark of a brutal man, not the devil.”
An expression of pity came into the Monk’s eyes. “So she has deceived you, my son. Her words of honey have led you into error. There is no rape, my son there is only the sin of Eve.”
We learn at this time that Evan was married. That he had children. He had guilt about it.
“But there’s lots of deformed kids,” Thea said reasonably, not quite understanding. She had never seen families who, if they had children at all, did not have at least one child who had not turned out right. Even in her controlled environment where each of the pregnancies had been tended with precision and care, her brother Davey had not been normal. For a moment she could see him again as she had last seen him, nine years old, lying in his bed and crying as he flailed his spidery arms about, futilely trying to grasp something, anything, with his limp bony hands.”
Even as the monks torture them for refusing to bow to their survival cult, Evan tortures himself with the memory. It is a powerful character moment because it is then that Evan figures out that Thea has never loved. She doesn’t know the world as it was. The monks and the pirates end up killing each other. Our heroes are more than ready to let them fight, but escaping means losing everything they had to survive. Including their precious crossbows. They start again from nothing surviving keeps them from having to confront Evan’s growing feelings.
That is until they find a home where they can eat, build a fire, and take a bath. For months they settle in a play homemaker. Evan reads to her novels from the past world and they try to make love. It is a challenge at first but Evan is teaching her for a moment to live like it was but that prompts Thea to question.
“It was a waste.” His voice was harsh. “A whole city died because too damn many people lived there. They all wanted things. Another car. Television. Wash-after-one-wearing clothes. Freezers full of food. Everyone wanted that.” He stopped long enough to finish the brandy in the glass and pour more. “It wasn’t their fault, though it wasn’t. No one told them the truth.No. Not the truth Truth. Truth.” He wagged a finger at her – “Doesn’t win elections. Or sell papers Truth isn’t popular. So they died. Suddenly he stopped. So we’re like goths living in the ruins. The dark ages comes again.”
In the very end, there is still no hope but Evan and Thea find love and are willing to stay together. It makes for a nice romance surrounded by this super bleak novel. False Dawn is incredible, up there with the most powerful of post-apocalypse novels. A real gem of ecological horror and Speculative warning. We should be happy this world never came to be but Yarbo does an amazing job painting a dark classic. I loved it.
