SUMMARY: When everyone around him inexplicably collapses as they go about their day, Mike Proctor is faced with this very question. Driven by a desire to push on in the memory of his wife and daughter, he has a vision. A vision to build a safe haven for the thousands of survivors he hopes are out there, but when they fail to materialise, he must re-evaluate his own existence.
The BookViral Review: A neatly arrayed post-apocalypse novel Phill Higgins delivers a compelling depiction of what it must be like to ascend into a place that’s familiar one moment and hell the very next. With its apocalyptic central premise and eclectic cast of characters, some of whom are destined not to make it, you could say Dawn of the Apocalypse is a survival story in the truest sense of the term, but Higgins neatly sidesteps smug clichés to take us to places we might least expect and doesn’t settle for comfortable solutions. More importantly, his storytelling is focused but he doesn’t make the mistake of exalting his characters as extraordinary individuals. They are simply survivors and through Mike, Derek, Paula and Rachel, he is grimly efficient at building up the drama whilst allowing their emotional fragility to come through. This, in turn, creates an inimitable sense of time and place so we never lose sight of the tenuous nature of their survival with the latter poignantly captured through the death of Jake.
The narrative staging is fairly straightforward with different character perspectives effectively converging. These providing for unexpected narrative twists and an ending which presents an interesting dilemma for Mike which will certainly bring about some reflection.
Dystopian Science Fiction is very much in vogue but much of it proves lacking in content and originality. Dawn Of The Apocalypse, however, proves refreshingly original and entertaining. A strong debut for Higgins it is highly recommended.
