Customer Reviews

Dawn's Uncertain Light (Signet)

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Is "Dawn's Uncertain Light", by Neal Barrett, Jr., a good book? That's a trivial question, as anything written by Neal Barrett, Jr. Is a good book. If he wrote user manuals for vacuum cleaners, the result would still be a set of literary masterpieces. But the more relevant question is whether you should read "Dawn's Uncertain Light", and there we must tread on more shaky ground.

"Dawn's Uncertain Light" is the sequel to "Through Darkest America", Barrett's earlier post-apocalyptic masterpiece about frontier life, warfare, and unsettling dietary habits. "Dawn's Uncertain Light" picks up right where the earlier book left off, with Howie on a cross-country odyssey to find his sister at Silver Island. Upon arriving, he finds the island in ruins and encounters a band of escapees who inform him that Carolee was killed. This drives him to further pursuit of revenge, and he eventually falls in with a mysterious preacher who takes him by sea to California.

As far as writing goes, Barrett delivers exactly what's expected. The writing is raw and simplistic, the emotions roaring forward just as they did in the first book. The grand finale is a classic of Barrett-style cynicism. But my beef (ahem) with this novel is that it retroactively changes the meaning of much of what happened in "Through Darkest America". After reading the revelations at the end of "Dawn's Uncertain Light", the whole situation becomes less one of anarchic insanity reigning supreme, and more of a long gripe about religion and politics. To my mind, "Through Darkest America" was so perfectly constructed to deliver its message that I didn't really want to see a sequel meddling around with it.

I didn't know Dawn's Uncertain Light was a sequel when I read it. I picked it up from a used bookstore because the author and the premise interested me.

I enjoyed the author's style and Howie Ryder, the reluctant hero of the novel, seems to come to life. Like a horrifying western, we are lead from one bizarre encounter to another, experiencing it with the protagonist.

I actually looked up the novel here on Amazon to see if there was a sequel and instead discovered a prequel. I wonder what my opinion will be reading these books in the reverse order?