Subject: Review of Expiration Date by Tim Powers (fiction, sf)

From: [email-masked] (Steve Brock)
Date: 5 May 1996 01:49:14 GMT

EXPIRATION DATE by Tim Powers.  Tor Books, 175 Fifth Ave, N.Y., NY
10010, (800) 221-7945, FAX: (212) 420-9314.  381 pp., $23.95 cloth. 
0-312-86086-2

                     Reviewed by Steve Brock

     "I swallowed him, like the whale swallowed Jonah.  (Well, 
     I inhaled him, actually.)  But can I throw up the ghost? 
     Cough him out?  Or will they really have to cut me open 
     to get to it?"

     Another dazzling original by an acknowledged master.  In
Powers' elaborate and spectral alternate reality set in present-day
Los Angeles, eleven-year-old Koot Hoomie Paraganas destroys a bust
of Dante to which his parents have paid homage since he was a baby. 
Inside, he finds a glass vial.  He opens it and takes a sniff.  As
a result, "... in his head things clanged and flashed as they
hurled incomprehensively past, voices shouted, and his heart
thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and
shame all mixed together so finely they seemed to constitute life
itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur
into white."  A life itself, but no ordinary life.  Koot has just
snorted up the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.
     As soon as Edison is liberated into Koot's body, several
people become cognizant of the fact and begin to stalk him.  It
seems that there is nothing like the high of inhaling the last
breath of the dying, and the more famous they are the better the
burst of memories.  Trailing Koot are Sherman Oaks, a one armed
tramp who tracks ghosts with his phantom limb; Pete Sullivan, who
drives to L.A. seeking the spirit of his dead father (dad's ghost
comes ashore in the body of a monstrous fish); and the Cruella
DeVille of apparition-eaters: Loretta DeLarava, a film-maker who
lives on the Queen Mary.
     As Koot runs for his lives, Edison intermittently wakes up and
takes over the child's body, leading to several comic sequences,
such as Edison's craving for a cigar or whiskey.  Replete with
chase scenes that involve metaphysical juxtapositioning and a
culminating battle on the deck of the Queen Mary, "Expiration Date"
packs a virtual wallop that will have readers holding their
breaths, lest their souls be consumed by its characters. 
Grade: A-.
     Also by Powers: "Last Call" (1992), "The Stress of Her Regard"
(1989), "On Stranger Tides" (1987), "Forsake the Sky" (1986),
"Dinner at Deviant's Palace" (1985), "The Anubis Gates" (1983),
"The Drawing of the Dark" (1979), "Epitaph in Rust" (1976), and
"The Skies Discrowned" (1976).

%A Powers, Tim
%T Expiration Date
%I Tor
%C New York
%D 1996
%G ISBN 0-312-86086-2
%P 381 pp.
%O cloth, US$23.95

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