Black Dawn

by Dave Stern and Alex Brown

A chillingly dark and epic tale of good and evil in the tradition of Stephen King's The Stand. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380814862
• ISBN13: 9780380814862
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: HarperTorch
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Incredible, but lacking a payoff...

I'll start off by saying, like many others, that this book has what can be described, at best, as an ambiguous ending; an ending that kept me from giving it a full five stars. A quick and painless wrap-up to a story that seemed to be building to so much more. But if you read books for their content, rather than their resolution, I cannot overstate the captivating nature of this book. To be fair, I read the majority of this book while on an excessively long road trip through an incredibly dismal storm and nearly unpopulated parts of Central Florida. The backdrop made for an incredibly engrossing experience, though, as by the time I looked up from the book to see where we were, I half expected a desolate, post-apocalyptic world to be staring back at me. To get the full effect, I strongly suggest reading this book in less-than-perfect light, on an overcast and stormy day if possible. It has the potential to draw you in so deeply that you can truly visualize yourself in its world, something that is increasingly rare in books these days. While many have criticized the writer's tendancy to kill off main characters with chapters worth of backstory in less than memorable scenes, to me this only helped to accentuate the brutality and impending doom inherent to the plot. It makes for a startlingly fresh approach to the concept that death is inevitable, everyone that dies has lived a long and storied life, and not everyone gets to die in an epic struggle. Sometimes you spend months on a journey only to get unexpectedly beheaded by a tiger that you never saw coming. Comparing this book to The Stand is like comparing 28 Days Later to Night of the Living Dead. Yes, they're both "End of the World" novels. Yes, they both focus on the final conflict in the war between Good and Evil. The similarities end right about there, though. Books with these same themes have existed for thousands of years, Stephen King just happens to be the most recent great writer in the genre. This is no more a ripoff of The Stand as it is of Revelations. Get over it. I would like to say that I have recommended (and in some cases, loaned out) this book to multiple friends, and anyone with an enthusiasm for reading, and have never heard a negative comment about it except "What was up with the ending?" I will continue to suggest this book to anyone and everyone, because it truly is a great reading experience. It just has a tendancy to leave a bad taste in your mouth at the end.

As far as end of the world stories go, this one is good.

I got this in a used bookstore and was suprised by it. It is your average end of the world story except in this book the action never lets up. I actually give it 3.5 only because I thought the author ended it rather quickly and I was dissapointed in that because he really had some great characters in the book that I wanted to read more about and find out more as to the reasons of Armegeddon starting but these things still did not diminsh my enjoyment of this book. If you like fast paced, end of the world, fantasy-horror books then I recommend this one.

Explosive. Tight. Entertaining.

Black Dawn is explosive. With a foreboding sense of utter doom, similar to King's The Stand and McCammon's Swan Song, D.A. Stern has written a tightly woven horrific masterpiece. It is complex and constant.Los Angeles may be used to rolling blackouts, but the city of angels was not ready for what overcame them. It came in two waves. The first started with complete power outages that not only knocked out utilities, but also rendered batteries useless. The second wave was more of a spiritual power outage, that tore through the hearts and souls of the people, allowing for the propensities toward violence become the norm in most.The bizarre blackouts, spreading across the country in a spiraling fashion have the American people fearing the worst. The military think it is a biological war that has been initiated by an unknown enemy. Some think it is the time of the Apocalypse. There is a gathering of people, the evil with the evil, the good with the good, and at times the good, unsuspecting, with evil. Stern's novel is a tight, character driven horror novel. Each chapter reads like a cliffhanger as he moves from one central character to the next. The pacing is amazingly fast, and terribly frightening. Forget any supernatural evil, just to realize that people actually have violent tendencies like those illustrated in the novel is beyond scary. Stern is a powerful storyteller, using crisp dialogue and succinct narrative. Consider me a Stern fan.--Phillip Tomasso III, author of Third Ring, Tenth House & Mind Play

My review

A well written horror story. There were too many characters, but the author managed to pull it together . The story kept my interest, and I was unable to put it down until I finished. It would be interesting to find out what happened to the lead characters after the end of this story.

End of the World?

Believable characters who connect with each other on their different journeys make for some frightening, but ultimately satisfying reading. The end of the world as we know it may be on its way ,but there is promise of a future for a better world to come. The present terrors which the author evokes occur because of a fabled and bloody past. realistically presented.A good and satisfying read..