Expiration Date

by Duane Louis and Duane Swierczynski

Book Overview

If you thought Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde and Severance Package were page turners, hold on to your seat. Expiration Date is a detective novel with a time-travel twist that will leave readers gasping.

In this neighborhood, make a wrong turn... and you're history.

Mickey Wade is a recently-unemployed journalist who lucked into a rent-free apartment--his sick grandfather's place. The only...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312363400
• ISBN13: 9780312363406
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

couldn't put it down!

I've been a huge fan of Swierczynski since reading SECRET DEAD MEN and THE BLONDE. He's a writer who gives you something new and surprising with every book. Things I especially loved about EXPIRATION DATE were the feeling of childhood nostalgia and the vivid sense of time and place. The artwork by 2000 AD and Marvel artist Laurence Campbell was an added joy! The opening sentences are a great hook into this story: "See that body sprawled on the hardwood floor, marinating in a pool of his own blood? "That's me." After getting that far, I couldn't put the book down. And my high expectations weren't disappointed with this original - and often touching - thriller about a down-on-his-luck journalist, Mickey Wade, who takes four Tylenol and travels back in time. Trapped in a wraithlike and disempowered state, Mickey must unravel a murder mystery from the past. Cue twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the end. Another reviewer has compared Swierczynski to Charles Bukowski - a great way of describing his supremely readable prose, which combines human warmth with unpredictable quirkiness. I've been on a Swierczynski jag since I picked up THE BLONDE and I highly recommend this particular brand of awesome noir kool-aid. If you're already a fan, pick up EXPIRATION DATE for your next fix. And if you've not discovered him yet, just buy the bunch and treat yourself!

Movie Coming Soon

Great read. Loved it! Although it's a bit weird having your history exposed around the globe. I have always enjoyed my son's writing, even as a kid he had an imagination that could spin a good yarn. He paints a picture that has me believing I'm sitting in a movie theater. Keep up the good work, I'm proud of you....Dad

Pulp Noir With A Time Travel Twist

Duane Swiercznski has emerged as one of the best pulp noir thilller writers out there today. Each of his four novels has been vastly different in subject and focus yet each has been innovative, creative, and provocative. His work can be characterized as adrenaline fueled E-ticket rides through nightmarish circumstances. Read one, and you'll want to read them all. In "Expiration Date", Mickey Wade has lost his job as a writer with a Philadelphia newspaper, and down on his luck, moves into his grandfather's apartment in the run down neighborhood where he grew up. Taking what appears to be out-of-date Tylenol from his grandfather's medicine cabinet for his headache, Mickey awakens in the apartment and neighborhood as it was 30 years earlier. Quickly he is thrust into a time travel paradox that totally devours his consciousness and soon that of his girlfriend, Meghen. Realizing that the 12 year old boy living beneath his apartment will grow up to murder Mickey's father, Mickey begins plotting to change history. Can Mickey affect history in his ethereal form where only a very few can see him yet where he is subject to terribly unforgiving rules like having to stay out of the sunlight etc.? Where did these "magical" pills come from? What does his hospitalized grandfather know about the pills and Mickey's past? Swiercznski creates a breathtaking thriller that examines those questions and others that tickle our imaginations about time travel and out-of-body experiences. "Expiration Date" is well plotted with believable characters and credible dialogue. Swiercznski does a fine job of recreating the sights and sounds of neighborhoods in Philadelphia. But as always, the joy is in reading his innovative outside-the-box portrayals of everyman caught in circumstances that seem beyond his control. This is a highly recommended read as is all Swiercznski's work.

Night Walkers

If Charles Bukowski or Jim Thompson were writing today, I think it would read a lot like Duane Swierczynski: gritty, hip, and irreverent prose wrapped around twisted plots with the surprise around the next bend just another notch more outrageous than the last. "Expiration Date" is Swierczynski's fourth novel, the tale of Mickey Wade, a recently unemployed writer for an alternative Philadelphia newspaper. Down to his last six pack and only a few bucks, Mickey has little choice but to return to the rundown Frankford neighborhood of his youth, squatting in his comatose grandfather's temporarily vacant apartment. Finding what appears to be a bottle of long-expired Tylenol in the medicine cabinet, Mickey wakes up in 1972, the year of his birth. Time travel has been a familiar theme in fiction since H.G. Wells, but fans will know that a ride back through time with Swierczynski is anything but common. Mickey finds his 1972-being somewhere between corporeal and ethereal - invisible to most but not all; a ghost-like presence unable to walk through walls but possessing only limited physical power and a Dracula-like aversion to light. The author spins a number of mind bending threads through his time warp, from a serial killer to a despicable pedophile to the murder of his own father, wrapping together in a satisfying climax that is all Duane Swiercznski. While all four of Swiercznski's novels have had radically different themes and characters, they share a common bond: page turning fiction that - if not devoured in a single setting - will gnaw at the edges of your conscious until you can get back to finish them off. This is rock-em sock-em writing, pure adrenaline that would be guilty pleasure if it weren't so damn clever - a new breed of pulp fiction in which Swiercznski and a short list of others are setting the standards. If you haven't discovered him yet, "Expiration Date" is a good place to start - trust that it won't be your last.

His best yet

If you haven't heard of Duane Swierczynski, you're in for a treat. This guy's one of the best writers I've read in years. It's not straight up pulp noir, no, it's better than that. Pulp noir with a sci-fi/fantasy twist. Expiration Date is the story of a down on his luck guy who happens upon a means of going back in time, and then happens upon his father's murderer. The story is one of the few time travel stories I've ever read that doesn't fall into a time travel plot hole. You will find this book especially entertaining if you're from Philadelphia. The gritty detail brings some familiar locales to life. Get it, read it, love it, and then check out his other books: The Blonde, The Wheelman, Severance Package, or Secret Dead Men.