Like Last Call, Tim Powers’ Expiration Date is set in a gritty parallel of the modern world, where the majority of inhabitants go about their daily business without a clue as to the real underpinnings of supernatural power that ripple and flex just beneath the surface of our reality like a snake’s muscles beneath diamond-patterned scales. Again, we have a city so clearly described, the city’s persona so clearly captured, the place of the action functions as a major character. Where else but Hollywood, California would you live if you were addicted to snorting up ghosts of the dead rich, glamorous, famous, and powerful?
Pre-pubescent Koot Hoomie Parganas — known as Kootie — is in trouble. He’s been raised in a psychologically isolated environment by parents who seem to have their own cult, with a membership of two. The cult members seemingly have just two directives: to keep Kootie safe from the dangers of Big Macs, Tetris, Nintendo, girls, any prospect of a “normal” life and anything else usually craved by average American eleven-year-olds; and to constantly pray to a plaster bust of Dante. When Kootie deliberately breaks the statue and runs away he knows his parents won’t be happy, but he doesn’t expect his action to wake every ghost and ghost hunter in a city crammed full of ghosts and people addicted to eating them.
He also doesn’t expect to be suddenly sharing his body with the ghost of Thomas Edison, or find himself on the run from a powerful ghost addict. A large cast of primary, secondary, and tertiary characters show up to aid or hinder Edison and Kootie in their flight. Kootie’s greatest allies are themselves some of the most broken people he meets: an unemployed electrician — with Houdini’s hands — haunted by a dead twin sister; a long-dead d-list actor/landlord animating his own slowly decaying body, keeping it artificially tenantable year after year with ice, cinnamon candies, and creative apartment remodeling; a disgraced atheistic psychiatrist haunted by her own spectacular failure to heal patients through the very volatile but powerful medium of Hispanic Catholic mysticism.
Powers again pulls off an incredibly convincing reality, populating a world so like ours with a cast of people so broken and imperfect, they can’t help but be believable. Themes of addiction and redemption and revenge and forgiveness run deep here, but deeper still is the same theme underlying Last Call: the love of family. A family can come together from the most disparate group of broken and flawed beings. These beings don’t have to be biologically related, or spiritually related, or even of like mind. They just have to come through for each other when the chips fall, or when the boat comes in, depending on whether you’re reading Last Call or Expiration Date. I’ll report back next on Subterranean Press’s Deluxe Hardcover release of the last book set in this same ‘verse, Earthquake Weather. If it’s as compelling a read as these first two, I won’t be disappointed. Going on a Tim Powers binge is like riding a seriously off-kilter rollercoaster you don’t want to step off
Subterranean Press 2008)
