Dragon Day is an Audible original urban fantasy audiodrama with a variety of voice actors, and featuring Hayley Atwell in the lead role.
Dragon Day, written by Bob Proehl, takes the form of a series of interviews by Neve Pride (Atwell) revealing the origins, rise and progress of the conflict between the suddenly emergent dragons and mankind. The titular Dragon Day, which takes place in the present or the very near future is the day that the Dragons emerged, explosively, and began their years-long reign of terror. (Dragon Day is given a month and day, but not a year.) Neve turns her former career as a journalist into a chronicler of the stories of the witnesses, survivors and fighters against the dragon onslaught.
More so than this, the central story of Dragon Day is the story that emerges in the course of Neve’s journalism and that is the fate of herself, and the separated members of her own family. This is the beating emotional heart of the story. Even as we untangle the mystery, slowly, of where the dragons came from, and why they act as they do, and humanity’s efforts to combat them, the emotional story of Neve and her daughter trying to reunite with the remainder of their family is the character connection that runs through the production.
The format and the touchstone for this is clearly World War Z. If one wanted to characterize the high concept of this audio drama as “an audio version of World War Z, except dragons instead of zombies” you would have the general gist of what Proehl is going for, here. The audio drama is arranged roughly in chronological order of events, although there is some jumping forward and back now and again—Proehl plays a bit with the order of the audio interviews and clips in time for more emotional beats and heightened drama. We see events from the days just before Dragon Day up to about a year and a half after Dragon Day before a flashforward at the end of the drama gives the listener parallax and perspective to the project.
This approach, being a collection of interviews but not actual analysis, also does allow the listener to piece together the story for themselves from the pieces of information that Neve collects. Given that the framing makes it clear that this is all years in the past (just how far is made clear in the denouement), the real suspension and tension is the putting together of the pieces of the puzzle, and, as mentioned above, the emotional drama of Neve and her family throughout.
The audio drama does try to explain, since it has to propose how the problem originated and resolved, a plausible scenario for how the dragons came to be, where they came from, and eventually how to combat them. It’s got a real balancing act to manage here, since Dragons as we know them are even more implausible than zombies. It makes some choices to make Dragons seem physically plausible in some respects (wings, for example) but even so, the Dragons have abilities and qualities that defy explanation and in the heat of the moment of the fight against dragons, and some of these qualities are in fact never explained at all. In this way, Dragon Day does feel more like an urban fantasy than anything else.
But one thing I did appreciate is that the story avoids the trap in its worldbuilding that Reign of Fire (another genre piece I thought of as I listened to this audiobook) makes. Reign of Fire, which is all about a post-apocalyptic world where Dragons erupted and have knocked civilization back to small enclaves, does have some resemblances to Dragon Day in terms of the sheer unexpected nature of the emergence of Dragons and of course, their potency. (Dragon Day does answer some questions not raised in Reign of Fire and frankly are another plothole: Why would the Dragons resist the militaries of the world so effectively? In Reign of Fire, though, the climax and denouement of the plot are in the killing of one particular Dragon, one key male dragon that, when defeated, will herald the end of the Dragons as a threat. It makes for great cinema, but substandard worldbuilding.
Dragon Day does have as its climax the first successful resistance against Dragon attacks and showing it is possible to fight back, but the actual audio diaries end at that point and we get a flash forward to after the war is over, looking back at Neve and her place in history. In so doing. the story makes it clear what Reign of Fire does not: that given the one victory, it took years of additional fighting after the victory to defeat the dragons. The path of resistance is a long one. But yet, though, given how that resistance plays out, the drama does leave some major questions unanswered (and frankly, room for very different stories to tell in this universe if they ever wanted to do so).
The audio production and voices are very well done. Atwell does an excellent job as Neve, and she has the most air time. We get a variety of voices and actors in major and minor roles alike, ranging from Michael Chiklis to Aldis Hodge, Greta Lee, Jimmi Simpson and a host (over a dozen in all) of lesser well known voice actors. This is an audio drama in the full style with a slate of voices. If you are the kind of audiobook listener that wants and likes a suite of actors, this book will suit your needs nicely.. If you are the type of listener who is put off by full cast recordings, this is, unfortunately for you, exactly that.
To my ear, the drama sounds good and goes down easy in the ear. This is a drama you can put on for a moderate car drive and get good value for your listening. While the drama is broken up into sections (in addition to the various chapters), the production values always (perhaps by design) encouraged me to listen a little bit longer every chance I got.
There are some awkward bits, having multiple conversations recorded that realistically, really would never have been recorded by Neve, but for reasons to fit the format and the style of the piece, had to be shoehorned into the conceit of the narrative. It is at the end of the drama that we see why Proehl had to make sure to remain within those constraints. It’s a creative challenge and choice that doesn’t always quite work, but again, he seems to be following the World War Z model, except even more strictly. There is also a bit of awkwardness with the world building of just how badly civilization is suffering, and I noticed an inconsistency or two here and there. But these were minor quibbles for my enjoyment of the story and narrative.
In all, Dragon Day is a relatively short audible audio drama that does not overstay its welcome and in addition to being a postapocalyptic story with Dragons, works capably as a story of a woman trying to save her family, in the midst of an unlikely kind of apocalypse whose story she is determined to tell.
