Expiration Date is a noir-ish time travel piece of crime fiction. While it uses science fiction tropes, I don’t think it’ll appeal particularly to that fandom. The story really rides on the crime fiction rather than the science fiction.
Mickey Wade is a newly unemployed alt-weekly writer who has to move into his comatose grandfather’s apartment to make ends meet. Free rent and all. The place is located back in his old neighborhood of Frankford, Philadelphia where Mickey grew up. It’s not a pretty neighborhood, and there resides all sorts of Mickey’s ghosts. Mickey takes a couple of grandpa’s aspirin one night that turn out to be not the pills he thought they were. They transport him to the past as a ghost, where he runs into the 9 year old boy who will years later kill Mickey’s father.
The time travel trope used here is very standard. Can you go back and become your own father sort of thing. Swierczynski’s story, as plot driven as it is, relies more on its characters and relationships and a sense of place about Frankford more than it does who does what when. Time travel serves more as a device to parcel out the narrative. Mickey can only travel back in time for short periods, and he can’t precisely place himself in the past storyline, and thus the jigsaw puzzle can’t be filled in smoothly for the reader. It’s pretty artfully done.
What I really enjoyed about the story though was Mickey’s relationship with his family and his neighborhood of Frankford. Mickey both loves and misses his father, but also resents his father too. He idolized his father’s musical ability but remembers all the weekends without him because he was working gigs. In retrospect Mickey is also mad his father screwed up the possibility of a big record contract. And Mickey can’t say enough bad things about Frankford and how it’s a bad neighborhood, but he also takes pride in the fact that a serial killer stalked the area during the late 1980s.
However, as much as I enjoyed the time travel as narrative device and the relationships of the book, I am rather pissed at the book’s ending. Actually offended even. The ending turns a dirty crime novel into a Leave It To Beaver episode. For the love of god, just stop reading at the end of the second to last chapter. It’s so much better that way. I read an advance uncorrected proof
. I hope to god someone came to their senses and dropped the last chapter for the real book.
Luckily, everything up to there was awesome, and the second to last chapter is a great ending for the story. I’m just going to mentally block out the last bit and call this one of the best crime fiction pieces I’ve read in ages.
Some other blogged reviews:
Title: Expiration Date
Author: Duane Swierczynski
Imprint / publisher: Minotaur / Macmillan
Format: Advance reader copy
Length: 246 p.
Publication date: March 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36340-6
I received this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Review program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $11.19 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.
