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Fault Lines #2
Expiration Date
Los Angeles is filled with ghosts ― and half-ghosts, and ghost hunters, and ghost junkies ― chasing each other in a mad quest for immortality. As a series of disasters strikes Los Angeles, a young boy inhales the last breath of Thomas Edison, and becomes a precious prize in a deadly hunt for the elusive vital spark. Brimming with the wild imagination and heart-stopping escapades that won Tim Powers the World Fantasy Award, Expiration Date is an exuberant and inventive tale from one of fantasy's most original talents.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
57 people are currently reading
1452 people want to read
About the author
Tim Powers
167 books1,747 followersTimothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare.
Most of Powers's novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.
Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959.
He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton.
Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him.
Powers's first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages.
Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop.
He also taught part time at the University of Redlands.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Most of Powers's novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.
Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959.
He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton.
Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him.
Powers's first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages.
Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop.
He also taught part time at the University of Redlands.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 158 reviews
February 16, 2025
I have liked other books by this author, but this was frustrating. I love ghost stories, but this was just chaos.
August 16, 2023
Tim Powers is the Maestro of haunted LA Noir.
This book, perhaps more than any other, is key to understanding Powers’s dark Los Angeles.
Powers’s disturbing, uncanny ghosts are a signature element that tie together not only his Los Angeles noir landscapes, but his entire universe of work, from 17th century Vienna (The Drawing of the Dark) to Byronic London (The Anubis Gate) and beyond. Often those ghosts play side roles, adding atmosphere to his stories, but here they take center stage as the main attraction. Powers’s uncanny ghosts drive this tale. Expiration Date is practically a text book as to how his unique ghosts function throughout his works.
In Expiration Date, Powers rips aside the veil of normality to show us a dark LA that lies just beneath the flash and glitter. It’s crawling with mad and confused ghost, and a loose cult of humans who obtain thrills, power, and psychic sustenance from consuming them like some deranged designer drug.
”What do you know about ghosts?”
“People eat them…they can be drawn out of walls, or beds, or empty air…they like candy and liquor, but they can’t digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dried twigs and rocks…they’re frail little wisps of smoke when they’re new…the way you eat them is to inhale them, but if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff —physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit, what have you, and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor…A lot of the street lunatics you see are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that.”
With Expiration Date, Powers delivers not just an uncanny ghost story, but another of his brilliant occult-tinged hidden histories. Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, and Lewis Carrol all play surprising roles in this ghost world, and 1950s Hollywood and The Queen Mary figure significantly into the tale as well, as Powers redefines history as we thought we knew it for his eldritch, occult underworld.
Expiration Date is not without flaws. Powers uses multiple storylines and points of view, all developing separately and only gradually coming together to reveal the big picture. He has used this technique effectively in other novels, but here it sometimes becomes confusing, and at others seems to add bloat to the story. Some villains seemed to be more feared than their actual level of power would justify, and the motivations for several of the protagonists seemed kinda thin. Also, the way all the characters end up being so closely interconnected strained my suspension of disbelief at times, though it wasn’t terribly hard to talk myself off that ledge by invoking ghost logic. But still..
Expiration Date is the middle novel of Powers’s Fault Lines Trilogy, which began with his masterpiece, Last Call, and concludes with Earthquake Weather. (Both Last Call and Expiration Date can be read as stand alone novels, sharing no characters, but Earthquake Weather brings both of those books together.) Expiration Date isn’t Powers at the top of his game, but it is an atmospheric, creepy tale, and should be considered a must read for Powers fans looking for a deep dive into the mechanics of the ghost that populate his works. 3.5 star rounded up.
This book, perhaps more than any other, is key to understanding Powers’s dark Los Angeles.
Powers’s disturbing, uncanny ghosts are a signature element that tie together not only his Los Angeles noir landscapes, but his entire universe of work, from 17th century Vienna (The Drawing of the Dark) to Byronic London (The Anubis Gate) and beyond. Often those ghosts play side roles, adding atmosphere to his stories, but here they take center stage as the main attraction. Powers’s uncanny ghosts drive this tale. Expiration Date is practically a text book as to how his unique ghosts function throughout his works.
In Expiration Date, Powers rips aside the veil of normality to show us a dark LA that lies just beneath the flash and glitter. It’s crawling with mad and confused ghost, and a loose cult of humans who obtain thrills, power, and psychic sustenance from consuming them like some deranged designer drug.
”What do you know about ghosts?”
“People eat them…they can be drawn out of walls, or beds, or empty air…they like candy and liquor, but they can’t digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dried twigs and rocks…they’re frail little wisps of smoke when they’re new…the way you eat them is to inhale them, but if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff —physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit, what have you, and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor…A lot of the street lunatics you see are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that.”
With Expiration Date, Powers delivers not just an uncanny ghost story, but another of his brilliant occult-tinged hidden histories. Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, and Lewis Carrol all play surprising roles in this ghost world, and 1950s Hollywood and The Queen Mary figure significantly into the tale as well, as Powers redefines history as we thought we knew it for his eldritch, occult underworld.
Expiration Date is not without flaws. Powers uses multiple storylines and points of view, all developing separately and only gradually coming together to reveal the big picture. He has used this technique effectively in other novels, but here it sometimes becomes confusing, and at others seems to add bloat to the story. Some villains seemed to be more feared than their actual level of power would justify, and the motivations for several of the protagonists seemed kinda thin. Also, the way all the characters end up being so closely interconnected strained my suspension of disbelief at times, though it wasn’t terribly hard to talk myself off that ledge by invoking ghost logic. But still..
Expiration Date is the middle novel of Powers’s Fault Lines Trilogy, which began with his masterpiece, Last Call, and concludes with Earthquake Weather. (Both Last Call and Expiration Date can be read as stand alone novels, sharing no characters, but Earthquake Weather brings both of those books together.) Expiration Date isn’t Powers at the top of his game, but it is an atmospheric, creepy tale, and should be considered a must read for Powers fans looking for a deep dive into the mechanics of the ghost that populate his works. 3.5 star rounded up.
August 5, 2021
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
Regular readers will remember that I'm in the middle this year of reading the complete oeuvre of cross-genre author Tim Powers for the first time; I started with his award-winning The Anubis Gates , then jumped back to his very first book, the mediocre traditional space opera The Skies Discrowned , then decided to jump to his much-loved '90s "Fault Line" trilogy that made me want to read him in the first place, starting with the flabbergasting 1992 Last Call . Today's book, written four years later, is the second title of the trilogy, and like most trilogies' second volumes falls a little flat compared to the first, although I've been trying to pinpoint the reason but seemingly can't.
Like Last Call, it's a contemporary story about a secret history of magic that exists "hidden in plain sight" in the broken-down back alleys of Los Angeles; but while the first volume deals with a complex invented mythology concerning magicians, tarot cards, ancient Egypt and the Holy Grail, this second volume deals pretty exclusively with just the subject of ghosts, which I suppose is part of the reason it's a letdown over the previous book. Also, even though it deploys Powers' usual storytelling technique of following several disconnected sets of characters and their own individual struggles, with them slowly coalescing as a group more and more as the manuscript continues, here it felt like it took forever for that to happen; and some of those individual storylines, such as the one concerning a preteen Indian kid whose body is being inhabited by the spirit of a wisecracking, cigar-smoking Thomas Edison, were threads that I got tired of quickly, making it difficult to stay fully engaged as long as they continued to take place in their own hermetically sealed environment.
I mean, it's not a bad book by any means, with even so-so Powers easily rising above most of the other dreck in the "urban fantasy" genre -- any book that can tie together Edison, Harry Houdini, the permanently docked steamship The Queen Mary, the history of 1950s television, and the hippie cults of '60s southern California is an all-right book in my view -- but I feel that one can convincingly argue that Last Call is better, making it a bit disappointing when you read them back-to-back, as people often will when wanting to read this trilogy. The third book, 1997's Earthquake Weather, supposedly ties together all the sets of characters from both unrelated first two volumes, and details a secret magical history to the Napa Valley wine industry, so I'm definitely looking forward to taking that on next; so please keep an eye out for my review of that here in the next few weeks.
Tim Powers books covered in this review series: The Skies Discrowned (1976) | An Epitaph in Rust (1976) | The Drawing of the Dark (1979) | The Anubis Gates (1983) | Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985) | On Stranger Tides (1987) | The Stress of Her Regard (1989) | Last Call (1992) | Expiration Date (1996) | Earthquake Weather (1997) | Declare (2001) | Three Days to Never (2006) | Hide Me Among the Graves (2012) | Medusa's Web (2016) | Alternate Routes (2018) | More Walls Broken (2019) | Forced Perspectives (2020)
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
Regular readers will remember that I'm in the middle this year of reading the complete oeuvre of cross-genre author Tim Powers for the first time; I started with his award-winning The Anubis Gates , then jumped back to his very first book, the mediocre traditional space opera The Skies Discrowned , then decided to jump to his much-loved '90s "Fault Line" trilogy that made me want to read him in the first place, starting with the flabbergasting 1992 Last Call . Today's book, written four years later, is the second title of the trilogy, and like most trilogies' second volumes falls a little flat compared to the first, although I've been trying to pinpoint the reason but seemingly can't.
Like Last Call, it's a contemporary story about a secret history of magic that exists "hidden in plain sight" in the broken-down back alleys of Los Angeles; but while the first volume deals with a complex invented mythology concerning magicians, tarot cards, ancient Egypt and the Holy Grail, this second volume deals pretty exclusively with just the subject of ghosts, which I suppose is part of the reason it's a letdown over the previous book. Also, even though it deploys Powers' usual storytelling technique of following several disconnected sets of characters and their own individual struggles, with them slowly coalescing as a group more and more as the manuscript continues, here it felt like it took forever for that to happen; and some of those individual storylines, such as the one concerning a preteen Indian kid whose body is being inhabited by the spirit of a wisecracking, cigar-smoking Thomas Edison, were threads that I got tired of quickly, making it difficult to stay fully engaged as long as they continued to take place in their own hermetically sealed environment.
I mean, it's not a bad book by any means, with even so-so Powers easily rising above most of the other dreck in the "urban fantasy" genre -- any book that can tie together Edison, Harry Houdini, the permanently docked steamship The Queen Mary, the history of 1950s television, and the hippie cults of '60s southern California is an all-right book in my view -- but I feel that one can convincingly argue that Last Call is better, making it a bit disappointing when you read them back-to-back, as people often will when wanting to read this trilogy. The third book, 1997's Earthquake Weather, supposedly ties together all the sets of characters from both unrelated first two volumes, and details a secret magical history to the Napa Valley wine industry, so I'm definitely looking forward to taking that on next; so please keep an eye out for my review of that here in the next few weeks.
Tim Powers books covered in this review series: The Skies Discrowned (1976) | An Epitaph in Rust (1976) | The Drawing of the Dark (1979) | The Anubis Gates (1983) | Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985) | On Stranger Tides (1987) | The Stress of Her Regard (1989) | Last Call (1992) | Expiration Date (1996) | Earthquake Weather (1997) | Declare (2001) | Three Days to Never (2006) | Hide Me Among the Graves (2012) | Medusa's Web (2016) | Alternate Routes (2018) | More Walls Broken (2019) | Forced Perspectives (2020)
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July 19, 2019Bayağı bir kapalı, karanlık bir pazar günüydü. Henüz öğlen olmasına rağmen odamın ışıkları yanıyordu. Bulutlar öylesine siyahtı ki gökyüzünün üzerindeki cennetlerden başıma bir şelale düşecek diye korkmaya başlamıştım. Elbette bu durum serinin ilk kitabı olan, 680 sayfalık Son Çağrı’nın incelemesinden sonra 672 sayfa olan Süresi Dolanları okumak için pek de yardımcı olmuyordu.
Ben de her zaman olduğu gibi bir şeylerin üzerine gitmeyi sevdiğimden, kitabın ilk sayfasını çevirerek bu yolculuğa adım atıverdim. Buradaki ana problemim kitabın akıcılığının nasıl olacağıydı aslında. Süresi Dolanlar’ın haberini girdiğimde kitap oldukça ilgimi çekmişti, fakat serinin ilk cildindeki bazı sorunlardan sonra cesaretim biraz kırılmamış değildi. Şüpheli yaklaşsam da kitabı okuyor ve ilerliyordum, gözle görülür hiçbir sorun yoktu ve akıcılığı da bayağı iyiydi.
Halil Oğulcan Karamağara
İncelemenin tamamı: https://kayiprihtim.com/inceleme/sure...
Ben de her zaman olduğu gibi bir şeylerin üzerine gitmeyi sevdiğimden, kitabın ilk sayfasını çevirerek bu yolculuğa adım atıverdim. Buradaki ana problemim kitabın akıcılığının nasıl olacağıydı aslında. Süresi Dolanlar’ın haberini girdiğimde kitap oldukça ilgimi çekmişti, fakat serinin ilk cildindeki bazı sorunlardan sonra cesaretim biraz kırılmamış değildi. Şüpheli yaklaşsam da kitabı okuyor ve ilerliyordum, gözle görülür hiçbir sorun yoktu ve akıcılığı da bayağı iyiydi.
Halil Oğulcan Karamağara
İncelemenin tamamı: https://kayiprihtim.com/inceleme/sure...
April 18, 2021
3.5 stars
January 4, 2017
Tim Powers is one of my favorite writers, but EXPIRATION DATE isn't among my favorite of his books.
I've started and stopped it several times in the past, but this time I have the next in the loose series, EARTHQUAKE WEATHER to read and I was determined to push through and get to the end. But to be honest, I found it a bit of a slog.
It's as well written as any of Powers' books, but I don't think the central idea of ghosts being able to be caught and sniffed as a kind of psychic cocaine is strong enough to hold this rather rambling plot together. That, and the fact that the main protagonist is an eleven year old kid who gets a ton of shit thrown at him in the story rather turned me against the whole thing from an early stage.
There are some of the great visual touches and dexterity with a sentence that we expect from Powers but too much of the story consists of people going somewhere to get something, then going somewhere else to get something else, then meeting someone who will tell them where to go to get the next thing. It's like a modern L.A. version of a rather dull Dungeons and Dragons adventure and as such I found myself flicking pages to get to the good bits.
I think the main problem is one of too many point of view characters. We could have lost the lawyer completely from the story and it wouldn't change it a bit, and likewise the female psychiatrist was often just hanging around to be someone for one of the protagonists to talk to.
Still, even second rate Powers is better than most other things, and there was enough to entertain me to make sure I made it to the end this time.
Onward to EARTHQUAKE WEATHER...
I've started and stopped it several times in the past, but this time I have the next in the loose series, EARTHQUAKE WEATHER to read and I was determined to push through and get to the end. But to be honest, I found it a bit of a slog.
It's as well written as any of Powers' books, but I don't think the central idea of ghosts being able to be caught and sniffed as a kind of psychic cocaine is strong enough to hold this rather rambling plot together. That, and the fact that the main protagonist is an eleven year old kid who gets a ton of shit thrown at him in the story rather turned me against the whole thing from an early stage.
There are some of the great visual touches and dexterity with a sentence that we expect from Powers but too much of the story consists of people going somewhere to get something, then going somewhere else to get something else, then meeting someone who will tell them where to go to get the next thing. It's like a modern L.A. version of a rather dull Dungeons and Dragons adventure and as such I found myself flicking pages to get to the good bits.
I think the main problem is one of too many point of view characters. We could have lost the lawyer completely from the story and it wouldn't change it a bit, and likewise the female psychiatrist was often just hanging around to be someone for one of the protagonists to talk to.
Still, even second rate Powers is better than most other things, and there was enough to entertain me to make sure I made it to the end this time.
Onward to EARTHQUAKE WEATHER...
June 19, 2017
Tim Powers does a great job with the secret history concept, especially with L.A. as a backdrop. Expiration Date is a love letter to the seedier side of the city, encompassing abandoned apartment complexes, Latino herbalists, and the deteriorating Queen Mary. But while the novel is pretty fast and entertaining, I found it slightly disappointing. There were a lot of confusing concepts related to real electrical engineering (Thomas Edison is a character) and a complex underworld of ghosts and ghost hunters. Too many times, I had no idea what people were talking about. I also thought the novel went from having too many characters and perspectives to not enough. Toward the end, Powers abandoned almost all of his characters, including some of the interesting ones, and collapsed the narration into the single POV of the chief protagonist. Expiration Date has a lot of intriguing ideas and is certainly readable, but it's definitely not the strongest of Powers' novels.
March 20, 2008
If Atwood was ghost writing Pynchon and they managed to get William Gibson as their editor, then maybe, just maybe, there would be another book as uncannily brilliant as this.
One could list the topics (life, death and afterlife; recreational drug culture; mercenary telephone exchange operators; palindromes; Thomas Alva Edison's lost years and peculiar relationship with Henry Ford; the time-space continuum; Harry Houdini and more), or observe that it has provided a reading of Carrol's Alice books that makes them appear to be a straightforward biography, but that would all miss the mark. I haven't even mentioned the Queen Mary, after all, nor touched on the incredible characterization of the incredible characters.
Anyway, this kind of book is why science fiction matters.
One could list the topics (life, death and afterlife; recreational drug culture; mercenary telephone exchange operators; palindromes; Thomas Alva Edison's lost years and peculiar relationship with Henry Ford; the time-space continuum; Harry Houdini and more), or observe that it has provided a reading of Carrol's Alice books that makes them appear to be a straightforward biography, but that would all miss the mark. I haven't even mentioned the Queen Mary, after all, nor touched on the incredible characterization of the incredible characters.
Anyway, this kind of book is why science fiction matters.
December 4, 2009
I liked this, but not as much as Last Call. It took a little too long to get into the action of the story, there were too many narrators at the beginning (a few of which we never hear from again) and I felt that it didn't gel as a story until well after page 100 or so. That's a lot of pages for a reader to be wondering "I'm not exactly sure what's going on here and how it relates to the other threads of the story being told." Powers does a lot of the old "write about something that your readers don't know the details of yet, but that the author reveals later", which seems common in sci fi and speculative fiction and is a technique that I like, but in Expiration Date, I felt the lag between when Powers caught you up with the needed details was just too long. You just kind of flounder as a reader in this one a lot, to be honest. It also seemed weird to me that this was billed as a companion novel to Last Call when frankly, I don't see how the two novels are linked at all. However, the story was imaginative and fun, and it was a good read overall.
June 3, 2016
Tim Powers is one of the most creative writers of modern fantasy that I have ever read. Expiration Date touches on so many original ideas that it is hard to describe them without giving away spoilers. Powers has created his own pneumatology in terms of ghosts, undead (I know they aren’t “spirits,” but they are supernatural), and existence beyond material life. Imagine a capitalistic economy based on ghosts but handled much like drug deals of the present day. That is the crux of this novel. And, imagine that ingesting another’s “ghost” is like adding his/her soul to one’s psychic and physical inventory along with trying to digest said phantoms and use them to "live" forever.
I will also contradict myself in some fashion my usual objection to changing point-of-view at a quick pace. Powers restricts the number of characters involved in this brain transplant chain of perspectives. It wasn't a matter of such quick-takes that I found myself getting lost. There is a juvenile protagonist, a female protagonist who happens to be a mental health professional with a twist, a fraternal twin who becomes a major protagonist, a celebrity ghost supporting character, a soul-ingesting vampire antagonist, and a zombie antagonist with another twist. Early on, it looks like the juvenile has stumbled into a Topper-style comedy with sophisticated ghosts in tuxedos, but the plot turns dark and ugly almost immediately. This is no Topper or any other of the sexy, sophisticated, supernatural comedies of Thorne Smith.
Indeed, Expiration Date is a fast-moving adventure which uses the imagination to challenge the pure materialistic world-view (Yes, I know it’s a “fantasy” but fantasies often touch on archetypes and beliefs with which even modern humanity struggles!). As such, they symbolically place brush strokes about the nature of addiction, and deal with the altruistic “release” which comes from self-sacrifice and a sense of moving one’s own life forward. It also takes advantage of the physical descriptions of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Santa Monica to describe some of the conditions of the homeless. It may be fantasy, but those descriptions are gritty enough to feel real.
Expiration Date is also a parable on love, family, and the quest for meaning. Its scenes cover the idea of facing up to past mistakes, as well as getting beyond those mistakes and trying to guarantee that those same mistakes aren’t made in future, new relationships. It describes the idea of commitment and risk within relationships in a rather bold way. Readers who like to have a fascinating milieu for their fantasy yet long for very human (in every sense) stories will enjoy Expiration Date, another Tim Powers masterpiece akin to the unforgettable Last Call. Expiration Date simply exceeded my high expectations.
I will also contradict myself in some fashion my usual objection to changing point-of-view at a quick pace. Powers restricts the number of characters involved in this brain transplant chain of perspectives. It wasn't a matter of such quick-takes that I found myself getting lost. There is a juvenile protagonist, a female protagonist who happens to be a mental health professional with a twist, a fraternal twin who becomes a major protagonist, a celebrity ghost supporting character, a soul-ingesting vampire antagonist, and a zombie antagonist with another twist. Early on, it looks like the juvenile has stumbled into a Topper-style comedy with sophisticated ghosts in tuxedos, but the plot turns dark and ugly almost immediately. This is no Topper or any other of the sexy, sophisticated, supernatural comedies of Thorne Smith.
Indeed, Expiration Date is a fast-moving adventure which uses the imagination to challenge the pure materialistic world-view (Yes, I know it’s a “fantasy” but fantasies often touch on archetypes and beliefs with which even modern humanity struggles!). As such, they symbolically place brush strokes about the nature of addiction, and deal with the altruistic “release” which comes from self-sacrifice and a sense of moving one’s own life forward. It also takes advantage of the physical descriptions of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Santa Monica to describe some of the conditions of the homeless. It may be fantasy, but those descriptions are gritty enough to feel real.
Expiration Date is also a parable on love, family, and the quest for meaning. Its scenes cover the idea of facing up to past mistakes, as well as getting beyond those mistakes and trying to guarantee that those same mistakes aren’t made in future, new relationships. It describes the idea of commitment and risk within relationships in a rather bold way. Readers who like to have a fascinating milieu for their fantasy yet long for very human (in every sense) stories will enjoy Expiration Date, another Tim Powers masterpiece akin to the unforgettable Last Call. Expiration Date simply exceeded my high expectations.
October 10, 2023
Tim Powers is my greatest literary hero and some of his novels (The Anubis Gates, Declare) are among my very favorites. I would have liked to give this one 5 stars.
Powers' quirky, humorous eye for bizarre historical details is at work here as always. He found out Thomas Edison's dying breath was captured in a test tube and he asked, "Okay, what was that really about?" And from there he invents an explanation involving ghosts and a sinister group of people who control them.
Unfortunately, I found the magical explanations a bit too contrived and hard to follow this time around. Part of my problem is that we're following multiple point-of-view characters and switching between them didn't work so well for me.
Still, a wonderfully inventive book. Keep writing, Tim!
Powers' quirky, humorous eye for bizarre historical details is at work here as always. He found out Thomas Edison's dying breath was captured in a test tube and he asked, "Okay, what was that really about?" And from there he invents an explanation involving ghosts and a sinister group of people who control them.
Unfortunately, I found the magical explanations a bit too contrived and hard to follow this time around. Part of my problem is that we're following multiple point-of-view characters and switching between them didn't work so well for me.
Still, a wonderfully inventive book. Keep writing, Tim!
February 26, 2021
A minor, flawed, bumbling tome from Mr. Powers. Uncharacteristically, this is a slow-paced jumble of viewpoints, unnecessary descriptions... and jarringly bad gringo Spanish supposedly uttered by native speakers. How come they allowed this to be printed with so many errors? (why? lazy author and lazier editor!).
The story is simple enough, but it takes too long.
Finally, I don't really see the connection with the first book in the series. If it is there, it must be tenuous enough for me to miss. Will read book three some time, but I will lay off the series for a while.
The story is simple enough, but it takes too long.
Finally, I don't really see the connection with the first book in the series. If it is there, it must be tenuous enough for me to miss. Will read book three some time, but I will lay off the series for a while.
April 5, 2017
Whew. That was a tougher read for me. Maybe I wasn't mentally focused enough for it, because I had a hell of a time keeping all the characters in place in the beginning of the book. I stuck with it because I trust in Powers' writing, but it wasn't until about 300 pages in that the book finally had me hooked and I was swept along for the rest of the way. I'd probably appreciate this one more on a second read than I did this first time around.
June 18, 2023
I really like Tim Powers' work, but this was not one of his better novels. It seems like it was more of a spiritual (no pun intended) sequel to
Last Call
; it's certainly not a direct continuation of the story, and there's no obvious indication that they even take place in the same world, though it wouldn't be surprising considering the way reality works in both novels.
Unlike Last Call, which is all about poker and magic, this one is more about Hollywood and ghosts. Some subset of people seem to know that ghosts exist and are able to use them for some sort of magical effects, and also to rejuvenate themselves. The book follows some people caught up in this world unintentionally. It's interesting enough and I'll read the next one, but if it's your first Tim Powers novel, I suggest starting with The Anubis Gate instead.
Unlike Last Call, which is all about poker and magic, this one is more about Hollywood and ghosts. Some subset of people seem to know that ghosts exist and are able to use them for some sort of magical effects, and also to rejuvenate themselves. The book follows some people caught up in this world unintentionally. It's interesting enough and I'll read the next one, but if it's your first Tim Powers novel, I suggest starting with The Anubis Gate instead.
October 17, 2019
Pretty good premise for a book, but too confusing and honestly....I didn't really care what happened to any of the characters. I liked two of them, Kootie and Pete, but just lost all interest in their plights. Couldn't find the interest to even skim through and find out what happens in the end.
September 7, 2024
Spooky, weird, eerie.
September 28, 2017
The sea breeze was suddenly chillier on his immobile face, and he realized that he was crying. He couldn't taste the tears, but he knew that if he could, they would taste like cinnamon.
Where Last Call was about the magic of gambling and chance, and set in Las Vegas, Expiration Date is about the magic of ghosts and masks, and is set in Los Angeles. Because that, after all, is where such a story belongs.
Both stories have a brother-sister dynamic for the main character(s). And both use the history of their city as background for the story. Real events have a magical explanation—that probably makes as much sense as their real explanation, if they even have one. The occasional spontaneous combustion of a human body is explained as a ghostly chain reaction, much like a nuclear bomb but more localized.
Back in 1982, Alan Perlis wrote that “The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.” I tend to agree with that; perhaps Tim Powers does as well, because in this book Alice in Wonderland is the best book on ghostly magic for the layman. Most chapters are preceded by a quote from one of the Alice books, and ghosts, when they ramble, tend to quote from Alice.
There isn’t much except tone to connect Expiration Date to Last Call; however, if I remember right characters from both books appear in the third book of the series, Earthquake Weather.
In the opening chapters, a kid whose parents are grooming him to be a spiritual powerhouse ends up inhaling the ghost of Thomas Edison. Edison himself was wise in the ways of ghosts and I think for that reason is a powerful ghost himself. People in this book eat ghosts, and the more powerful the better, so everyone is after Edison’s. Even people who don’t know they’re after Edison’s ghost are after it, because when Edison is initially freed his loosing is felt throughout the Los Angeles area.
Which is how Pete Sullivan ends up losing his sister and heading back to LA despite his fear that he will be used in a plot to eat his father’s ghost.
The way Powers deals with famous ghosts is extraordinarily well-handled (pun somewhat intended, see book for details) as is the way he weaves the history of the film industry into the story.
October 16, 2021
3 plain-ass stars
Dude, you wanna snort some ghosts today? Sign me the fuck up!
I really wanted to like this book. The premise is certainly unique and Mr. Powers’s realistic spin on urban fantasy is quite refreshing. His attention to accuracy, ranging from locations to historical/technological references made this book more grounded in reality than its counterparts, where most urban fantasies read like caricatures of the real world posthumously topped off with magic.
Color me amused at how this book was such a slog. I’d normally finish a book this length within two days, however this one took me four given how the the plot moved at an excruciatingly glacial pace. To put things in to perspective, the plot took a break after the initial three or so chapters and resumed at the last 20%.
The majority of the chapters are loosely interconnected vignettes of various characters ranging from the main protagonists to the villains just mostly mulling about. The constant shift in character perspectives made it incredibly hard to feel invested with any of the cast. I often found myself dozing off or just rapidly skimming through paragraphs of irrelevant descriptions just to reach Kootie and Edison’s parts.
The ending was… abrupt, suffering from a massive bout of deus ex machina. Furthermore, the main conflict’s solution was so ridiculously simple. All that the MCs have to do was get from point A to point B, but somehow they managed to fuck it up. I swear that all of them shared a single brain cell for being so inefficient.
I have to credit the wisecracking Edison and my sheer stubbornness to complete every book that I start as my motivations in finishing this doorstopper.
Dude, you wanna snort some ghosts today? Sign me the fuck up!
I really wanted to like this book. The premise is certainly unique and Mr. Powers’s realistic spin on urban fantasy is quite refreshing. His attention to accuracy, ranging from locations to historical/technological references made this book more grounded in reality than its counterparts, where most urban fantasies read like caricatures of the real world posthumously topped off with magic.
Color me amused at how this book was such a slog. I’d normally finish a book this length within two days, however this one took me four given how the the plot moved at an excruciatingly glacial pace. To put things in to perspective, the plot took a break after the initial three or so chapters and resumed at the last 20%.
The majority of the chapters are loosely interconnected vignettes of various characters ranging from the main protagonists to the villains just mostly mulling about. The constant shift in character perspectives made it incredibly hard to feel invested with any of the cast. I often found myself dozing off or just rapidly skimming through paragraphs of irrelevant descriptions just to reach Kootie and Edison’s parts.
The ending was… abrupt, suffering from a massive bout of deus ex machina. Furthermore, the main conflict’s solution was so ridiculously simple. All that the MCs have to do was get from point A to point B, but somehow they managed to fuck it up. I swear that all of them shared a single brain cell for being so inefficient.
I have to credit the wisecracking Edison and my sheer stubbornness to complete every book that I start as my motivations in finishing this doorstopper.
January 16, 2013
I love Tim Powers' novels, and what I love about this one is the intersection of Thomas Edison's life with the secret world of ghost-hunters. This book is far too complicated to summarize in a few words, or even more than a few, but the core of the story is that a boy with the unfortunate name of Koot Hoomie Parganas has accidentally freed the ghost of Thomas Edison, and several people want to kill him and consume Edison's ghost. That's right, consume; in this secret history, ghosts can be eaten, inhaled, smoked, absorbed by anyone who knows how. Consuming a ghost gives a person a sort of high, and the quest for strong ghosts pits users against each other--and Edison, who protected himself his whole life against such people, is one of the most powerful of all.
Powers' narrative intertwines three major storylines and a handful of lesser ones that, grouped together, forms its own story (these are the various individuals trying to capture and kill Kootie. The poor kid doesn't even have a good nickname). Pete and Angelica, the other two main characters, have solid histories of their own. They start off flawed--Pete's been hiding from the past for fifteen years, Angelica bears the guilt of having caused the deaths of three people--and have to overcome the consequences of those flaws to help and protect Kootie. A host of secondary characters fills out the novel to give it the unique Powers flair, and the background of how ghosts are created and what happens when they're eaten rounds it all off.
Though technically Expiration Date could be considered part of a series (the first being Last Call and the third being Earthquake Weather), I prefer to think of it as being a standalone book that intersects with the story and characters of Last Call in Earthquake Weather. In any case, it works very well on its own and doesn't require any extra reading to enjoy.
Powers' narrative intertwines three major storylines and a handful of lesser ones that, grouped together, forms its own story (these are the various individuals trying to capture and kill Kootie. The poor kid doesn't even have a good nickname). Pete and Angelica, the other two main characters, have solid histories of their own. They start off flawed--Pete's been hiding from the past for fifteen years, Angelica bears the guilt of having caused the deaths of three people--and have to overcome the consequences of those flaws to help and protect Kootie. A host of secondary characters fills out the novel to give it the unique Powers flair, and the background of how ghosts are created and what happens when they're eaten rounds it all off.
Though technically Expiration Date could be considered part of a series (the first being Last Call and the third being Earthquake Weather), I prefer to think of it as being a standalone book that intersects with the story and characters of Last Call in Earthquake Weather. In any case, it works very well on its own and doesn't require any extra reading to enjoy.
January 28, 2018
I had this, then decided to read the first in the series first,(Last Call) even though it was about poker, presumably, one of my least favorite subjects. And I LOVED that one. So I moved on to book 2 and I LOVED this one though poker doesn't appear. Any precis would not do it justice: it's about ghosts and those who eat them, but not a horror story at all. The idea is that ghosts are electrical phenomena and their essence (for the right kind of ghost) can be inhaled to rejuvenate the user. Some ghosts are corrupted and can mess up the user; others solidify and appear to most people as street bums. Some dead people can "live on" if their ghost is confined upon death. The story line centers on two particularly powerful ghosts: that of Thomas Edison and of the father of the male protagonist. Both are pursued as desirable delicacies by assorted villains, one female; the three protagonists: a man, a woman, and an 11 year old boy try to find them first and get them to the sea, where they can be freed from having to stick around the world.
Partly under the influence of the story, I've developed a not-really serious theory about certain authors. Their writing "vibrates" rather like the strings in string theory, and if you find one that vibrates in tune with your own vibrations you find them compulsively readable, even if they are writing about---poker. Other people may not vibrate on the same "wave-length" and either dislike or feel tepid about the author. Other SF/fantasy authors who vibrate on my wave length are Ben Aaronovitch, Daniel O'Malley, Jonathan L. Howard, Jack McDevitt and Dave Hutchinson. I sail over plot holes and improbabilities, characters that others feel are thin, story lines that confuse at first. These authors just connect. Tim Powers for me is a Connector.
This isn't a read-at-one-sitting book; it is too intense. You have to trust that the varying story lines in the early part will come together--believe me, they do. You need a willing suspension of disbelief.
Partly under the influence of the story, I've developed a not-really serious theory about certain authors. Their writing "vibrates" rather like the strings in string theory, and if you find one that vibrates in tune with your own vibrations you find them compulsively readable, even if they are writing about---poker. Other people may not vibrate on the same "wave-length" and either dislike or feel tepid about the author. Other SF/fantasy authors who vibrate on my wave length are Ben Aaronovitch, Daniel O'Malley, Jonathan L. Howard, Jack McDevitt and Dave Hutchinson. I sail over plot holes and improbabilities, characters that others feel are thin, story lines that confuse at first. These authors just connect. Tim Powers for me is a Connector.
This isn't a read-at-one-sitting book; it is too intense. You have to trust that the varying story lines in the early part will come together--believe me, they do. You need a willing suspension of disbelief.
December 15, 2017
So the payoff is definitely worth it. And if you’ve read Powers before, you’ll know what to expect with obscure historical references, human heroes against disturbing (but somewhat badass) magical villains, and incredibly interesting magic that draws deeply from the human experience. Some of the ideas here are so fascinating that I’m very proud I managed to finish it.
Unfortunately, “managed to” is the correct way to phrase it.
The first third of the novel totally fails; based on a combination of too many disparate plotlines, basic plot and backstory details being kept overly obscure for the sake of “suspense,” and a not-so-great introduction to the story’s supernatural elements. There’s very little to latch onto in order to understand what’s going on. The second third is more readable, and a lot of exposition that SHOULD have been presented earlier shows Powers’ fascinating ideas. It’s over 60% of the way through when the plot finally comes together. But once it does, the payoff is great. I’m glad I got through it. I do still feel like I’ve missed some things and I’m tempted to re-read it.
If you haven’t read Last Call, read that instead. It’s excellent. If you read Last Call, loved it, and absolutely need more of Powers writing in a modern setting, then this offers worthwhile rewards for the patient.
Unfortunately, “managed to” is the correct way to phrase it.
The first third of the novel totally fails; based on a combination of too many disparate plotlines, basic plot and backstory details being kept overly obscure for the sake of “suspense,” and a not-so-great introduction to the story’s supernatural elements. There’s very little to latch onto in order to understand what’s going on. The second third is more readable, and a lot of exposition that SHOULD have been presented earlier shows Powers’ fascinating ideas. It’s over 60% of the way through when the plot finally comes together. But once it does, the payoff is great. I’m glad I got through it. I do still feel like I’ve missed some things and I’m tempted to re-read it.
If you haven’t read Last Call, read that instead. It’s excellent. If you read Last Call, loved it, and absolutely need more of Powers writing in a modern setting, then this offers worthwhile rewards for the patient.
June 16, 2008
Somehow manages to be expertly written yet completely unengaging at the same time? Points for the creativity and vivacity of the language, but minus 100000 for glacial plot movement and the endless carousel of superficially-quirky-but-actually-cookie-cutter characters, most of whom I couldn't bring myself to give two hoots about. Plus, the whole "thomas edison's ghost is on the loose and spiritually piggybacking a prepubescent boy and all the ghost junkies wanna piece of him! OH LOOK RANDOM ACTS OF HORRIFIC VIOLENCE AND EXPLODING DOG BOMBS LOLZ" bit just gets kinda "..." after awhile.
July 26, 2015
I'm going to have to agree with one of my buddies on this one.
He said
Having recently read "On Stranger Tides" this one suffers by comparison. I like its hallucinatory quality and the writing is interesting, but it felt flabby and weak compared to his previous effort "Last Call."
I like it and I would recommend it, but it isn't Powers' best.
I haven't read "On Stranger Tides" but this one was just OK compared to Last Call, which I've read about four times, and loaned with care to people I know would love it.
He said
Having recently read "On Stranger Tides" this one suffers by comparison. I like its hallucinatory quality and the writing is interesting, but it felt flabby and weak compared to his previous effort "Last Call."
I like it and I would recommend it, but it isn't Powers' best.
I haven't read "On Stranger Tides" but this one was just OK compared to Last Call, which I've read about four times, and loaned with care to people I know would love it.
Currently reading
June 3, 2010Doh! I read the first, and then the third in the Trilogy (dang ex-hub steering me wrong! but Right in the first place). Now, I am reading the second. Powers is muy lyrical, complex, mystical, and intense. Good stuff.
November 21, 2019
Upping my rating to 5 stars because Tim Powers and his amazing world-building and rules of magic. Love, love, love that this and Earthquake Weather are available now as Audible audiobooks!
November 23, 2016
So freaking good!
December 26, 2023
I’ve been familiar with the works of Tim Powers for a long time but before this year I’d only read three books by Tim Powers. This year I decided to reach a bunch of books by Tim Powers and I am glad I did. I’ve liked every book by Tim Powers I’ve read so far and he is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. There is a characteristic wonkiness and humor to Tim Power’s novels. He blends several genres into an aesthetic admixture that is strange and surreal. His novels are like a mishmash of different genres. Here we can see elements of history, magical realism, urban fantasy, psychological thriller, horror, and probably some other things I haven’t thought of. Many of my favorite books tend to be those that blend genres together. Literary references abound. This novel for example has a quote from Alice of Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass at the beginning of each chapter. These books by Lew Carroll are then referenced throughout the book. The characters all have their own motivations that sometimes seem obtuse. His plots are complex and unpredictable with a lot of surprise twists along the way.
In this book the core idea is that ghost addicts can inhale ghosts for strength and power eventually becoming dependent on ghosts for sustenance. When the ghost of Thomis Eddison latches onto the boy Kootie becoming something of a double personality this creates some of the most humorous parts of the book. He not only takes on some of the personality traits of Thomas Eddison – with Thomas Eddison literally taking over and possessing his body at parts of the novel – but he also retains many of Eddison’s memories. Thomas Eddison makes for a quirky character who has so many funny lines throughout the book.
Kootie’s parents are brutally murdered at the beginning of the book and Kootie has to run away from a one-armed, ghost sniffing addict who is after the ghost of Thomis Eddison that the boy has inhaled. Thomas Eddison’s ghost was being kept in a statue called a Dante statue. Kootie’s parents were into some weird religious stuff and they had strong religious expectations for Kootie to be some type of holy man. Kootie runs away after breaking the statue and accidentally inhaling the ghost. He will then return to find his parents ghosts dancing around and the mysterious one armed man who killed them. After this Kootie will then be on the run for most of the rest of the book until he finds Pete Sullivan and other important characters. That Kootie becomes an orphan so early on this creates strong pathos for the reader. I felt myself emotionally attached to Kootie rooting for him to escape from the bad men who are trying to get Thomas Eddison’s ghost.
There are several point of view characters in this novel. Kootie and a character named Pete Sullivan feel like the most important characters. Sullivan is on a mission to find his father’s ghost and save his father’s ghost from being eaten by an insane woman named Laura Delarava who is a film maker that Sullivan and his twin sister once worked for. Laura had used the twins in her ghost gathering activities. I can’t speak any more to this subject without spoiling the novel. I’ll just say that Laura Delarava is intimately tied with the past of Sullivan and his sister. Pete’s sister commits suicide early on in the book and this will become an instrumental plot point. Psychological Pete will be greatly affected by his sister's suicide.
Although I greatly enjoyed the journey of reading this book I had one huge problem with it. My main issue with this book is the climax. The climax felt too clunky and chaotic. He brings all the threads of the novel together but it just felt messy and hard to follow. This is a problem I’ve run into with a few of this author's books. Considering how much I greatly enjoyed reading this novel the ending was a disappointment. Regardless, I heartily recommend that you get out there and read as many Tim Powers novels as you can if you have not done so.
In this book the core idea is that ghost addicts can inhale ghosts for strength and power eventually becoming dependent on ghosts for sustenance. When the ghost of Thomis Eddison latches onto the boy Kootie becoming something of a double personality this creates some of the most humorous parts of the book. He not only takes on some of the personality traits of Thomas Eddison – with Thomas Eddison literally taking over and possessing his body at parts of the novel – but he also retains many of Eddison’s memories. Thomas Eddison makes for a quirky character who has so many funny lines throughout the book.
Kootie’s parents are brutally murdered at the beginning of the book and Kootie has to run away from a one-armed, ghost sniffing addict who is after the ghost of Thomis Eddison that the boy has inhaled. Thomas Eddison’s ghost was being kept in a statue called a Dante statue. Kootie’s parents were into some weird religious stuff and they had strong religious expectations for Kootie to be some type of holy man. Kootie runs away after breaking the statue and accidentally inhaling the ghost. He will then return to find his parents ghosts dancing around and the mysterious one armed man who killed them. After this Kootie will then be on the run for most of the rest of the book until he finds Pete Sullivan and other important characters. That Kootie becomes an orphan so early on this creates strong pathos for the reader. I felt myself emotionally attached to Kootie rooting for him to escape from the bad men who are trying to get Thomas Eddison’s ghost.
There are several point of view characters in this novel. Kootie and a character named Pete Sullivan feel like the most important characters. Sullivan is on a mission to find his father’s ghost and save his father’s ghost from being eaten by an insane woman named Laura Delarava who is a film maker that Sullivan and his twin sister once worked for. Laura had used the twins in her ghost gathering activities. I can’t speak any more to this subject without spoiling the novel. I’ll just say that Laura Delarava is intimately tied with the past of Sullivan and his sister. Pete’s sister commits suicide early on in the book and this will become an instrumental plot point. Psychological Pete will be greatly affected by his sister's suicide.
Although I greatly enjoyed the journey of reading this book I had one huge problem with it. My main issue with this book is the climax. The climax felt too clunky and chaotic. He brings all the threads of the novel together but it just felt messy and hard to follow. This is a problem I’ve run into with a few of this author's books. Considering how much I greatly enjoyed reading this novel the ending was a disappointment. Regardless, I heartily recommend that you get out there and read as many Tim Powers novels as you can if you have not done so.
February 17, 2020
Powers is one of my all-time favorite authors, to the point that I have trouble remembering his books are just a bunch of stuff he made up and not revelations of some secret history. This is one of the books of his (I've read them all) that makes the craft most obvious, where you have the strongest sense of a professional author constructing a story.
The main reason for this is that the first chapter is not only the most terrifying chapter in his entire oeuvre, it's so scary that the rest of the book can't begin to live up to it. The first chapter features a series of very, very bad events happening to the child, and there are a whole lot more terrible things that happen to him over the course of the book. And he feels them. Powers is not stinting with the trauma on this one. The little kid spends half the book wondering how this dog he accidentally exploded with his psychic powers was, because he doesn't know that he ended up wearing the dead dog around like a mask for a while. But the readers know, and it's...yeesh.
The rest of the book is crazy good and crazy scary and weirdly plausible, but nothing can quite come up to a young boy accidentally getting his parents tortured to death by a crazy homeless person and meeting their ghosts, who are rude to him. Can't top that. Don't want to see anybody try.
The main reason for this is that the first chapter is not only the most terrifying chapter in his entire oeuvre, it's so scary that the rest of the book can't begin to live up to it. The first chapter features a series of very, very bad events happening to the child, and there are a whole lot more terrible things that happen to him over the course of the book. And he feels them. Powers is not stinting with the trauma on this one. The little kid spends half the book wondering how this dog he accidentally exploded with his psychic powers was, because he doesn't know that he ended up wearing the dead dog around like a mask for a while. But the readers know, and it's...yeesh.
The rest of the book is crazy good and crazy scary and weirdly plausible, but nothing can quite come up to a young boy accidentally getting his parents tortured to death by a crazy homeless person and meeting their ghosts, who are rude to him. Can't top that. Don't want to see anybody try.
October 19, 2023
Writers as disparate as Murakami, Jack Vance, and Ian Rankin have demonstrated an awe-inspiring imaginative prestidigitation: namely, that ability to juggle wildly inventive and insane ideas while also crafting a coherent story. But this is Tim Powers at his most irritating. The man has no shortage of crazy ideas and EXPIRATION DATE contains some evocative Southern California imagery as well as original metaphors, such as ankle pain being compared to a sharp violin stab. But, in this volume at least, the man cannot plot to save his life. This seems to be an exercise in throwing as many wacky ideas at the canvas as possible (Thomas Edison's ghost inhabiting a boy's body, fish and crabs that wash up on the shores, twins, satirical dips into Old Hollywood), but without having any real clue on how to make it all congeal. This novel was in desperate need of a ruthless editor to take Powers aside and say, "Buddy, love your imagination, but you're a storyteller, for fuck's sake, and this freeform incoherence doesn't fly." The sloppy "We'll fix it in post" attitude behind this novel is extremely off-putting. It's a huge dropoff from LAST CALL. And while I'll finish up the FAULT LINES trilogy out of morbid curiosity, it's a shame that Powers put more of his revision energies into the prose as opposed to the story. A huge disappointment.
October 18, 2021
This was merely an even three stars. From the few books that i have read from him, while this did have some interesting overlap from the first brilliant novel of the series, it came way short of my high expectations of this author. Like the Alice novels, there is required a lot of suspension of disbelief to overcome here, and there were times that the novel just lost my attention. I thought it was rather convenient that Larava (whatever her name was) set up shop in a boat that not only had the ability to contain ghosts, but was also available as a serious instrument of her destruction as well (not just the destruction of all ghosts). Maybe it simply acted as a lure for her as well, but surely in her study of the boat and its history, that she knew there was a monster magnet that could be reactivated at any time, destroying the usefulness of the location?!!! In any event, i look forward to the next novel in this series, as we go back to the first novels detritus and explore that truly intriguing portion of this world. Onwards!!!
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