Rating: 
Summary: Have patience!
Review: If you've never read a Tim Powers book before, stick with this story early. All his books are impenetrable in the early going, but if you just let yourself go with the flow, you wind up getting swept along by the sheer force of the plot. The pattern applies with this book, and it all gets pretty neatly tied up in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Powers' latest is his most inventive yet.
Review: Just when you think Tim Powers' novels can't get any weirder,
they do. Expiration Date begins with the premise that ghosts
not only exist, but that inhaling them into your lungs prolongs
your life and is the best high one can experience. In the Los Angeles of Powers' novel, there is a thriving underground dealing in black market ghosts, sometimes called "smokes" or "L.A. Cigar".
It is impossible to do justice to a Powers novel with a synopsis.
His plots are wildly inventive and beyond description. But they
are not pure flights of fancy. His books are grounded in the real
world, but it is a world in which magic exists, hidden from the
uninitiated. Powers' descriptions of L.A. are very evocative,
reminding me somewhat of the hard-boiled detective fiction of Robert Campbell.
When Powers switched from historical fantasies to novels set in the present day, I had momentary regrets. But having read his two present day fantasies, Expiration Date and his previous novel, Last Call, I'm not at all sorry that he has moved on.
Rating:
Summary: A worthy sequel-- of sorts-- to Last Call
Review: Powers is hard to classify. He writes fantasy, but there sure aren't any trolls or hobbits or wizards here. His fantasy is a brilliant pastiche of the mystical detritus of several civilizations funnelled into the late twentieth century and then polished to a rare sheen by a fine, fine mind. He knows his stuff, and the more knowledge of Edison and Houdini and mysticism and spiritism you bring to him, the better you'll like this-- Powers gets it all right, and makes an entertaining story something more. This one's a bit more convoluted than Last Call, but just as rewarding. Along with its predecessor and sequel (Last Call and Earthquake Weather), this creation stands as a milestone of late 20th century fantasy, and should be enjoyed by all imaginative readers.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a long, long, trail, a-winding
Review: There is an awful conspiracy afoot in the fantasy publishing business. As soon as an author writes two or three good 300 page novels, the publishers' thugs kidnap them. The thugs lock the author up in a decaying castle and refuse to release him or her until he or she produces a 700 page doorstop.As doorstops go, this one isn't bad. I managed to read all of it. Admittedly, I was 30,000 feet over North America at the time, so I had limited alternatives. I found myself wishing, however, that the author had picked about 1/3 of the ideas and filed them down to fit in a nice, tight, plot, as in Drawing Down the Dark. When I went to buy a book to read on the return flight, I picked up the sequel to Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather. I carried it around the bookstore for several minutes. Then I put it down. It's time to find a new author who hasn't been locked up in the castle yet.
Rating:
Summary: Halloween in ghost-ridden Los Angeles
Review: This action-adventure fantasy takes place around Halloween in 1992 Los Angeles, a city full of ghosts and ghost predators. The action begins when 11-year-old Koot Hoomie Parganas (Kootie for short) rebels against his Mahatma-worshiping, vegetarian weirdo parents, breaks open their plaster bust of Dante, steals the glass vial inside and runs away.
Robbed and beaten up, he tries to go home but it's too late. He has set events in motion that have caused the murder of his parents and the convergence of forces drawn by the powerful ghost trapped in the vial - Thomas Edison.
Edison's ghost is a beacon, drawing rapacious "ghost-eaters" to hunt down Kootie, a bewildered boy who can't always tell his friends from his enemies. It also draws two other ghost-ridden people - Pete Sullivan, a man haunted by the drowning death of his father and hunted by an obsessed ghost eater, the film maker DeLarava, and Dr. Angelica Elizalde, a psychiatrist whose unconventional methods backfired on Halloween two years ago, killing several patients.
Powers sets these people on a collision course through a Lost Angeles so grittily, glitzily realized, you'll feel like you're walking its haunted streets in person. His eye for detail and the slight skewing of ordinary expectations heightens the atmospheric tension and creates an especially frightening world for the appealing and bewildered Kootie
.
Well-written, weirdly imaginative and fast-paced, the book's only fault is length. Long after most of the mysteries are solved, the protagonists are still running around barely escaping annihilation and it grows, unfortunately, repetitious. Powers redeems this minor fault, however, with a spectacular finale on the luxurious and history-loaded ship, the Queen Mary.
Rating:
Summary: The essence of this book is longing.
Review: This book is a beautiful exploration of the fantastic that, while not as good as the classic Anubis Gates or the masterful Last Call, isn't far behind them. The phenomenon of 'Bar Time' alone is a fascinating detail (one of literally _hundreds_ that dot this story) and one that brings to mind recent physics experiments in 'synchronicity' that used photons to demonstrate connections across vast space. Powers goes one better; he demonstrates connections across the gulf of death. From the exodus of Edison/Kootie across a nightmarish LA to the arrangment of tv antennas and electrical wiring to allow a dead man to maintain his hold on his body undisturbed by those that would literally 'consume' him, to the cost of ghost-eating as a habit, this book flinches very rarely. Powers is one of the best.
Rating:
Summary: Ghosts and the Modern World
Review: This is the first book by Tim Powers that I've read and I was captivated by the strong characterization, involved plot and his unique modern world of mysticism, ghosts and ghost-eaters. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: A Sharp Mind
Review: This isn't a book to read while recuperating from having one's wisdom teeth. A muddled mind utterly dependent on Naproxen Sodium to recuperate from oral surgery, is no match for this diligently written, and finely crafted story. In fact, the depth with which he writes, the details, the descriptive characterizations, had my mind reeling, to where all one could do, was grab another diet coke, and down a few more Aleve. This book is great fun, and the author has a wonderful way of writing an engaging, and highly original, and often funny story.
Rating:
Summary: I always wondered where those crazy bag ladies came from....
Review: Tim Powers answered a lot of questions for me, the most important of which was where did all those crazy bag ladies really come from. Of course I am being silly here, but I found myself nodding in approval when he explained that old ghosts start to solidify and wander about talking all crazy. With my living in San Francisco it made sense to me in a weird way. I cared for these people in the story because they are like the people I knew growing up bumping about the Bay Area with a brick laying step father and a coctail waitress mother. I know that some people hated this book because they couldn't find any reason to care for these people, but I found myself caring for them because no one else did and more importantly the characters had to come to a space where they cared about themselves enough to face difficult truths, make closure on issues that literally haunt them. Making up metaphysical rules seemed to bother some readers. But wake up folks, all these metaphysical rules that seem to be etched in stone were made up by someone. If some bit of cosmic chaos gets order in some arbitrary fashion and it works for someone, what is the problem here? Tim Powers made up some metaphysical rules concerning ghosts and how their essence can be snorted by ghost junkies and his rules were no less convoluted and mind numbing as anything one might find at the local Mystic Bloodshot Eyeball book store. One man's technology is another man's magic and that is why I loved the inclusion of Edison. Electricity was magic not too long ago, causing things to happen and the explinations for them were as mind numbing as any arbitrary metaphysical reasoning one can find. The two, electricity and metaphysics are not unrelated as researchers at Universities have proven by measuring the electromagnetic forces that can be measured between the palms of "Healers". Bravo Tim Powers, poor folk, burjas, bar folk, kids who find themselves powerless against foes out to do them harm, the crazy and the lucid all find an! adovacate in you. This story is for them and being one of them in some way, this story was for me, highly enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: The best entertainment money can buy!
Review: Tim Powers is one of the reasons that I had so much trouble in college. It was his ON STRANGER TIDES that distracted me from at least a complete day of classes. I remember reading ON STRANGER TIDES quite vividly, spending an 8 hour stretch curled up in a chair in the graduate library of the University of Texas, vicariously living the life of a pirate. Most of Powers' other novels have had the same hold on me, with the possible exception of THE STRESS OF HER REGARD, which I found somewhat slow and dull. I'm happy to say that EXPIRATION DATE is much more like ON STRANGER TIDES and THE ANUBIS GATES. Powers' trick of the trade is the incorporation of historical figures in wildly fantastical yet internally plausible plots. When this works, the reader learns something about the period and personalities while also being entertained. When Powers is at his best, the reader may think some of the fantastic parts *are* history. What if ghosts lingered on, and could be "attracted" by conundrums and disorder, could be absorbed by the living who are then "revitalized"? What if certain people's ghosts were stronger--people like Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison, who knew that their ghosts would be desired by the greedy living? These are Powers' concepts and he plays them perfectly, establishing the rules as he establishes the characters, always remaining consistent within his world. What Powers has done here is invent his own system of magic, as if he were writing a new role-playing system, then working within those rules as he role plays the characters toward the plot conclusion. Aside from the mechanics, Powers' strength also lies within his character portraits. In this long novel he handles at least five major protagonists and a dozen supporting cast, each a well-drawn individual. If there is anything of fault in EXPIRATION DATE, it is the lack of anything more than an incredibly entertaining, fun story. But is that a lack or just Powers' entire intention? In any case, if you want a piece of entertainment that doesn't treat you like a seven-year-old, you can't do any better than Powers or EXPIRATION DATE.
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