Black Dawn

Rating:
Summary: Close, no cigar
Review: CLose to being a terrific book, and because it some so close it is annoying when it lets you down near the end. IMHO "Night of the Beast" by Harry Shannon is a much better read for 2002, and although not an end-of-the-world tale, is vastly more entertaining. I will buy soemthing else by Stern, but this one needed an editor.

Rating:
Summary: Inconsistent, but still entertains.
Review: First thing first: This book is NOT a rip-off of The Stand. Why is it that whenever someone writes an epic, end-of the world horror novel everyone claims it to be ripping off the King book? Just like Robert McCammon's "Swan Song", "Black Dawn" has a similar premise to The Stand but the author then takes things into a completely different direction.

True, this is not a great book. Good, but not great. The author creates way too many characters for a book of this size(400 pages only). Worse, some of the characters he creates that you would think are essential to the story's development get killed off swiftly and quickly just when you start to get to like them.

It's true that writing an end-of-the-world book on an epic scale and with a dozen characters in only 400 pages seems like a daunting task. However, Simon Clark did it quite well with "Blood Crazy" as did Yvonne Navarro with "Final Impact". D.A. Stern doesn't do so well, however. But let's not call this a Stand ripoff when it is not. If we keep doing this, writers will shy away from writing this type of horror novel, which would be a shame.

Rating:
Summary: A Darned Good Try, But.............
Review: This book grabbed me by the throat from the opening chapter. I read it in two sittings. Actually, I would have finished it last night with a short intermission for supper, but we were in a cabin at 7-A Ranch in Wimberley, TX, and all the rest of the family (including our grand-babies) had gone to sleep; I didn't want to sit in the bathroom to read the last fifty pages.

It was strange reading about so much doom and disaster on a sunny afternoon in the Texas Hill Country in the yard of a cabin overlooking the Blanco River. The contrast, I think, made the book even more effective.

Of course, if we were in parts of Alaska I could have stayed outside reading until after midnight :-)

The characters are very human, the thrills come at you like a hailstorm. It moves like a rocket. The ending, though, was a major disappointment.

There was a lot to like here. This isn't a book that you can skim through, either. Major characters can get killed off in the middle of a chapter. Heck, in the middle of a paragraph, for that matter.

There are lots of characters in here that the reader can identify with and root for. But at the end of the story, which winds up with a major and unexpectedly heroic character scrambling for safety while climbing the Hollywood sign in a showstorm (events in the story involve major changes in the Earth's climate, and worse) you realize that the author has painted himself into a corner and just doesn't know where to go. And the ending cost the author two stars.

BUT let me hasten to add that D. A. Stern is definitely an author to watch. It would be easy to dismiss this as being derivative of THE STAND (it is, but since that's an awesome novel it shows imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery) but it goes way beyond that. Way, way beyond.

Maybe I can award those missing stars to Mr. Stern's next book, which I'm very much looking forward to.