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    Expiration Date: A Novel
    Expiration Date: A Novel
    Expiration Date: A Novel
    Ebook250 pages3 hours

    Expiration Date: A Novel

    By Duane Swierczynski

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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 problem: it's in a lousy neighborhood—the one where Mickey grew up, in fact. The one he was so desperate to escape.

    But now he's back. Dead broke. And just when he thinks he's reached rock bottom, Mickey wakes up in the past. Literally.

    At first he thinks it's a dream. All of the stores he remembered from his childhood, the cars, the rumble of the elevated train. But as he digs deeper into the past, searching for answers about the grandfather he hardly knows, Mickey meets the twelve-year-old kid who lives in the apartment below.

    The kid who will grow up to someday murder Mickey's father.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 30, 2010
    ISBN9781429985277
    Expiration Date: A Novel
    Author

    Duane Swierczynski

    DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI is the author of The Wheelman, The Blonde, Severance Package, and Expiration Date, and writes for Marvel Comics. The Wheelman was nominated for the Gumshoe Award. He lives in Philadelphia.

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    Reviews for Expiration Date

    3.5/5

    88 ratings21 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An intriguing premise, but one that ultimately doesn't fully live up to its potential. Three and a half stars for effort, three for execution.

      Mickey Wade has just lost his job as a newspaper reporter. Unable to keep his apartment, he accepts his mother's suggestion that he move into his grandfather's apartment. (Mickey's grandfather was just admitted to the hospital.) After a drunken binge he goes looking through his grandad's medicine cabinet and takes four pills from an old Tylenol bottle. But the pills instead send Mickey back to the past, to the year he was born. He meets the boy downstairs who will grow up to ultimately murder Mickey's father. Like I said, this was an intriguing premise, and although I enjoyed the book, Mickey wasn't ever fully sympathetic to me. He seemed to drink a lot, and the fantastical premise of time travel struck Mickey as more of a burden than a thrill.
    • 5/5
      Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski is set in a specific neighborhood of Philadelphia, one that in the present has fallen into disrepair but was a thriving working class neighborhood in the 1970s. The buildings though are rent controlled, and down on his luck Mickey Wade has moved into his grandfather's apartment while the old man is in the hospital.And while he's there, he stumbles upon the ability to travel back in time to his childhood, back before his father is brutally murdered by a local kid, now locked up in a nearby institute. So questions arise: is this time travel real? Can anything be done with it? Is it bad for Mike's health?What unfolds is a murder mystery and time travel story that flips between the past and the present. It's thematically similar to Clannad and Clannad After Story, the U.S. version of Life on Mars (minus the last episode), and The X-Files. It's not as hardcore a time travel story as The Man Who Folded Himself or The Man in the Empty Suit.
    • 5/5
      An excellent try-to-wrap-your-head-around-this-time-travel story, complete with a whodunit and a surprise ending. Just when you think you've got it figured out, the author throws another twist in the story.
      And make sure to read the background of this story and how it came to be published. Almost as fascinating as the story itself!
      Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Expiration Date was the first book written by Duane Swierczynski I have ever read. It will not be the last. Expiration Date was well written, fast paced, suspenseful, entertaining and just plain fun to read. From the first page until the last, I could hardly stand to put this book down.
    • 4/5
      Once again, Swierczynski has a brilliant idea for a novel. An out of work writer, forced to move back to his old neighborhood--now basically a slum--find a bottle of pills that transport him back to the year of his birth and give him, he hopes, a chance to unravel the mystery of his father's murder and the man who killed him. Swierczynski draws upon his own background, growing up in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia, and even incorporates an old newspaper piece he wrote about the Frankford Slasher (with the victims names changed) almost word-for-word into the novel. Still, the book lacks the breakneck pace and irresistible momentum of his best work. The story is a bit choppy, and the time travel premise results in a paradox that is impossible to swallow. Nevertheless, the book's portrayal of 1972 and present-day (2009) Frankford is fascinating, the writing is compelling, and the story is still a lot of fun. Your mileage may vary.
    • 4/5
      Get a doze of noir. Throw in a few tablespoons of time travel. Stir and add a beautiful woman, family secrets and old music. After it start boiling, add a crazy doctor and a murder. Now put the whole thing in the form of a novel and you will get Expiration Date.When a book starts with the death of the narrator, there are not so many possible stories that can make sense. Duane Swierczynski somehow managed to find a new angle. Meet Mickey. He just lost his job as a journalist and is returning back to his old neighborhood - the place he made everything possible to escape. It's a rough and cruel part of Philadelphia and the years since he moved out had not helped much. But the apartment is rent-free and Mickey cannot afford to pay rent just now. Add to this a beautiful woman and your noirish tale start to take shape. And of course when our narrator has a bad headache and finds some weird pills in the medicine cabinet of his grandfather (who is in hospital), he just takes 4 of them. They are in a painkiller bottle after all, even if the expiration date is way in the past. They don't really help for the headache but they send him straight back to the past -- to the day he is born. And a few hours later, he shows back in the present. It takes a while for Mickey to realize the connection but once he does, he simply accepts it... and start experimenting. And while looking for any explanation of what is happening, he starts learning about his life and family - secrets buried for decades that just come back to light. And his excursions to the past make the things even worse. Every time when you decide that the something got resolved, things get a lot more complicated. Add a psychiatric hospital (and no, Mickey is not crazy and he does not have a Bobby Ewing moment either), the aforementioned beautiful woman, a few more surprises in the present time and a dawning realization of how his father had really died and why. And each new revelation changes how he sees certain events. Traveling gin the past is a dangerous business and he learns that pretty fast. The only problem is - is it fast enough?And then the end of the novel throws you into yet another spin. And if that is not enough, the very last sentence adds yet another one. It is a very fast read, written in a style that helps the story to move fast and smooth. It is a little bit predictable in places - if you had read a few time traveling stories, you will see some of the developments long before the narrator... But then this is not exactly uncommon and it does not take away anything from the book. Note: Don't read the last sentence of the summary at the end of the book, I really hate it when these summaries give away a major plot element that happens relatively late in the book.
    • 4/5
      What would happen if you took an author who wrote for Marvel Comics and had him write a noir thriller that walked some of the paths laid out by Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" with flavorings of 1970s conspiracy theories and the 1982 Tylenol Scare thrown in for good measure?Something kind of fun. Veterans of time-travel stories may figure out a number of things before the author reveals them but the ride is still enjoyable. Expiration Date is fast-paced (there's definitely something in the writing style that gives a hint of a comic's quickness), humorous and has that gritty flavor that makes noir enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      this kind of mystery isn't usually within my taste, but I gave it a try and loved it! it has a great plot, and I found it totally captivating, I couldn't put it down
    • 4/5
      Take an unemployed journalist, place him in a rough old Philadelphia neighborhood, give him a tainted bottle of Tylenol (remember the 80s scare?), beat this together and you end up with a heady mix of time-travel, murder and self-discovery. Mickey Wade, the writer, quickly finds himself entangled with his own past, including his parents and grandparents, a radical scientist and a serial killer. Swierczynski has a fast-paced writing style, both hard-boiled and quirky, a perfect recipe for a quick summer read.
    • 4/5
      I love books about time travel! This book is a different take on time travel than any other book I've read. The plot was engaging, and I couldn't wait to figure out what was going on. I'd definitely recommend this to other time travel and scifi fans.
    • 4/5
      Wow! What a ride! I fully expected this book to be in the noir fiction style and I was not disappointed. But more than that, it was part fantasy/time travel. The book grabbed my attention and kept it throughout. A short book, this was a one-sit read. This is a fast, fun, hang on for the ride type book that fully satisfies the desire for a guilty pleasure.
    • 4/5
      It's hard to classify, my best description, is start with pulp noir, add a pinch of secret government conspiracies and then a dash of the consequences of going back in time and changing the past, and bake into the clarity of a dream that you wish you could remember. All in all, I have to say that I liked it. I started reading it, wondering if I really wanted to read a mystery, or was I in the mood for something else. But it quickly grabbed my attention, and didn't let up til the end.
    • 4/5
      Mr. S does it again. Lower key than his other forays into crime/noir/pulp fiction. As usual excellent story telling with interesting characters that you actually care about. Also Mr. S does not repeat himself with a formula based on his past books, he always comes up with new twists and plotlines that keep you reading. Excellent.
    • 4/5
      This book pulled me in right away, it had a unique take on time travel and it's consequences. It was a quick read, and even if the ending was somewhat predictable, it worked well. I will be looking for more of his books.
    • 4/5
      I've read three of Swierczynski's previous novels -- Secret Dead Men, The Blonde, and The Wheelman -- and I enjoyed all of them, particularly Secret Dead Men and The Wheelman. Thus, I was pleased to get this one through Early Reviewers. Unfortunately, I came out a little bit disappointed.I feel like the pieces are basically there, and there's not much specific that I can point out as being a failure (aside from the rather numerous typos and errors, but it's an Advance Uncorrected Proof, so I'll assume that the final print will remedy most of that). I like the premise and the plot, I like the noir-meets-slightly-sci-fi vibe, I don't have any complaints about the characters, it's not badly written... yet it just didn't come together in a way that pulled me in or really won me over. I was interested enough to keep reading, but not in a can't-put-it-down way. All in all, it was fine -- it would make a good airplane read -- but not particularly memorable.For those who've read his other books: This one is more in the vein of Secret Dead Men than The Wheelman or The Blonde. (I haven't read Severance Package yet, so can't compare those.)
    • 3/5
      Mickey Wade loses his job as a journalist and moves into his grandfather's unoccupied apartment in a run down section of Philadelphia. He takes some pills that he thinks are Tylenol, but which end up transporting his spirit back into the 1970's. Once he figures out the connection with the pills, Mickey starts to make repeated trips into the past, and starts to learn more about his family history and the murder of his father. His spirit can only interact with the world in limited ways, but Mickey starts looking for a way to save his father.This is a good story with a number of twists, but it never really pulled me in. The story never really built up much suspense, and most of the interesting revelations are crammed into the end of the book. I didn't care that much for the character of Mickey so I wasn't too concerned about what happened to him. Expiration Date is interesting for a slightly different look at time travel, but not a must-read.
    • 3/5
      Duane Swierczynski's Experation Date was a different take on time travel. It's a genre that I usually find quite intriguing, but something about this didn't really hit the mark with me.The story revolves around Mickey Wadcheck, or as the protaganist goes by Wade. After losing his job as a reporter he moves into his grandfather's apartment while his grandfather is in the hospital. His first night in the apartment he wakes up in the middle of the night with a terrible headache. He goes and grabs an ancient bottle of Tylenol and somehow ends up back in the past. He soon makes the connection that the pills allow him to travel back to the past and he begins investigating his father's death. Mickey's father was brutally killed when he was a child, and Mickey becomes determined to change that. He also discovers the time-travelling pills are what landed his grandfather in the hospital. The main character wasn't particularly likeable. There was no chemistry apparent with his girlfriend. I just found it hard to get into the story. I kept waiting for the story to happen. It was like the events unfolded, but there wasn't a lot of emotion attached to it. The author failed to create an empathy for his characters. It's origins as a graphic novel are evident, but without clever artwork the story falls flat. The plot has potential, but it never really delivers.
    • 3/5
      I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The ingredients were there -- a mystery, time travel, an intrepid girlfriend, an evil villain -- but I just did not like the main character. The loss of his father at a young age creates an unstable home life, but he just comes across as whiny. He never really reaches out to the other people in his life or tries to connect with them. The flow of the storytelling also betrays its beginning as a graphic novel. I think with a little editing it would have been more enjoyable. Overall, it is not bad, but just does not suit my taste.
    • 3/5
      Expiration Date presents a new take on time travel—at least in my limited science fiction experience. I'll leave those details for the reader to discover. But we do have a familiar attempt to change the future by altering the past.Mickey Wade, an unemployed crime-beat writer, knows the seedier details of his community's history. He thinks he knows the details of his father's death by murder. The ability to travel into the past presents an opportunity to right some wrongs and to see his father one last time. Past events intertwine in surprising ways as Mickey struggles to uncover the truth of his father's death and save a young girl from a deranged murderer. How will these changes to history affect Mickey in the present?I liked the book. The plot moves along quickly with no wasted scenes, chapters, or even words. It reads more like a short story than a novel but does deliver an interesting story.
    • 4/5
      At first, Expiration Date appears to be a rather run-of-the-mill modern noir - down in the heels reporter moves into his grandfather's apartment and faces his family's rather unpleasant history. But it quickly unfolds into quite a bit more, playing with questions about time travel and how one might go about changing the future. Swierczynsko comes up with some interesting answers without trying to explain the "science" of his experiences. Instead, the focus is on how our hero reacts to his experience. I liked the approach, but ultimately, the ending of the book is a bit unsatisfying even if it flows naturally from the events of the story.
    • 5/5
      Wow, this was a wild ride. I got this book through the LibraryThing Early Review program, and this is based on an advance uncorrected proof. But it feels done to me, it grabbed a hold of me and I finished it in a couple of days. Mick Wade has lost his job as a reporter and his mother convinces him to move into his grandfather's apartment in a bad section of Philly. His grandfather is in a coma in a hospital down the street, and all of his things are still in the apartment, including an asprin bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet. When Mick takes some to counter a headache, he's thrown back into his past, when he used to live just a few houses down from the apartment he's currently in. He's like a ghost in the past - only a few people can see him, it's hard to touch things, and he can only visit a certain time frame from his birth to his boyhood. He searches through his grandfather's papers and finds out more about his father's death and the people who affected his life. Competing time walkers muddle the events as Mick tries to make things come out better by changing the past, and murder, drug addiction, and insanity, all contribute to the darkness of the story.

    Book preview

    Expiration Date - Duane Swierczynski

    I

    Thomas Jefferson Goes to a Porno

    I was sitting on my front stoop, drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. At eleven bucks a six-pack, Sierra’s a splurge beer, so I tried to savor every sip. I’d probably be drinking pounder cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from now on.

    After a while Meghan came out and I handed her the last one. She thanked me by bumping shoulders. We sat for a while and drank our beers in the warm downtown sun. It would have been a perfect day if I wasn’t moving out.

    Meghan leaned back on her elbows, blond hair hanging down across her forehead.

    You sure I can’t give you a ride?

    I swallowed, enjoying the bitter taste of hops in my mouth, the bright sun on my face. Then I looked at her.

    Frankford’s kind of a bad neighborhood.

    No neighborhoods are bad, Mickey. They’re just misunderstood.

    "No, seriously. It’s bad. There was a story in yesterday’s Daily News. Some high school kid there was murdered by three of his friends. And I don’t mean over a dumb fight over sneakers or drugs. I mean, they planned his execution, killed him, then worked hard to hide the evidence."

    "They didn’t work too hard if the Daily News found out about it."

    Meghan and I had been friends since the year before, when I moved to Sixteenth and Spruce, just a few blocks away from swank Rittenhouse Square. If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia, you know the square I’m talking about—high-end restaurants, high-rise condos. I couldn’t afford this neighborhood even when I was gainfully employed.

    But two weeks ago my alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City Press, decided they could get by with only one staff writer. They wished me all the best. Since no other papers were crying out for my services, here or elsewhere, I joined the ranks of the newly unemployed. Just like hundreds of thousands of other people.

    So now my meager possessions were almost packed and I was waiting for a ride from my mom so she could take me to my grandfather’s cramped—yet rent-free—efficiency in Frankford, which was a long, long way from Rittenhouse Square.

    Normally I refused to accept any help or advice from my mom. The less she knew about my life, the less I owed her, the better. But my back was up against the wall now. I couldn’t afford another week in this apartment, let alone another month. I had no money for a deposit on another apartment.

    I was moving back to Frankford.

    Slumming is one thing when you’re twenty-two and just out of college and backed up by a deep-pile parental checking account. But moving to a bad neighborhood when you’re thirty-seven and have exhausted all other options is something else entirely. It’s a heavy thing with a rope, dragging you down to a lower social depth with no easy way back to the surface.

    Worst of all, you can still see them up there—the friends you graduated with fifteen years ago—laughing and splashing around, having a good time.

    The last thing I wanted was Meghan to escort me to the bottom of the ocean, give me an awkward hug, then swim back up to the party. She’d offered to drive me at least a half-dozen times over the past two weeks, and I repeatedly had told her no, my mom insisted on taking me.

    Which was a total friggin’ lie.

    You don’t want to go to Frankford, I said. It’s one of the busiest drug corridors in the city. It even used to have its own serial killer.

    Now you’re just making stuff up.

    "Completely serious. Happened when I was in high school—in the late 1980s. The guy was called the Frankford Slasher, and he killed a bunch of prostitutes. I wrote a piece about it for the Press."

    That was Jack the Ripper.

    It was also the Frankford Slasher.

    Still think you’re making it up.

    I pushed myself up by pressing my palms on the warm brownstone.

    I’d better finish packing. A couple of teenagers could be plotting my death as we speak, and I don’t want to disappoint them.

    Or the Frankford Slasher.

    Fortunately, I’m not a prostitute.

    Not yet.

    Nice.

    There was an awkward moment of silence. Then Meghan looked at me.

    Call your mom, Mickey. Tell her I’m driving you.

    Frankford wasn’t always a bad neighborhood. A couple hundred years ago it was a nice quiet village where the framers of the Constitution would spend their summers to escape the stifling heat of the city. I could show you the place—Womrath Park—where Thomas Jefferson allegedly kicked back and read the Declaration of Independence for the first time in public.

    But take Thomas Jefferson to Womrath Park now. Introduce him to the new owners of the park—the hard young men selling little white chunks of smokeable snuff. Walk him into the triple-X theater across the street, where he’d be treated to projected images of people engaged in a very different sort of congress.

    You could almost imagine him marching back down to Independence Hall and saying: Look, fellas, I think we oughta think this whole freedom thing through a bit more.

    A century after Jefferson, Frankford the Quiet Country Village morphed into Frankford the Bustling Industrial Neighborhood. It was a popular way station on the road (King’s Highway) from Philadelphia to New York City. The streets were crowded with factories and mills, along with modest-but-sturdy rowhomes for the workers who labored in them. There were cotton mills, bleacheries, wool mills, iron works and calico print works. There was a bustling arsenal and gunpowder mill. The industry thrived for a while, then sputtered, then died. Just like it did in the rest of the country.

    But they say the neighborhood was truly doomed in 1922, the year the city ran an elevated train down its main artery—Frankford Avenue—shrouding the shops below in darkness and pigeon crap. White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, drugs found Frankford, and invited all of its friends to stay.

    And I’d told Meghan the truth: a serial killer really did prowl the dark avenue under the El, late at night, looking for drunks and prostitutes in the 1980s around dive bars like Brady’s at Bridge and Pratt. The Slasher was never caught.

    A Philly band called American Dream had a minor pop hit back in the early 1970s called Frankford El. The chorus explained that you can’t get to Heaven on the Frankford El. Why?

    Because the Frankford El goes straight to…Frankford.

    Grandpop’s block looked like a junkie’s smile. Starting from the extreme left, you had the dirty concrete steps leading up to the Margaret Street station of the El. Right next door, an abandoned building. Then, a weeded lot. A three-story building. Weeded lot. Grandpop’s building, the ground floor occupied by one of those beer/rolling paper/pork rind bodegas that upset City Council so much. Weeded lot. Weeded lot.

    Out of an original eight buildings on this strip of Frankford Avenue, only three remained.

    My new place was up on the third floor, where it appeared I’d have an excellent view of the El tracks.

    Meghan gazed up at the dirty underbelly of the El through her windshield. Pigeons nested around up there, covering every possible square inch with their chunky white shit.

    It’s not so bad.

    You’re right. If you squint, it’s eerily reminiscent of Rittenhouse Square.

    This is probably the next great undiscovered neighborhood. Look what they did to Fishtown and Northern Liberties.

    Yeah. They could level the area with a bunker buster and start all over.

    She scanned the block. Across the street was a rusty metal kiosk that, if I remember correctly, used to be a newsstand. Now it appeared to be a community urinal.

    Think it’s okay to park here?

    Meghan was born and raised on Philadelphia’s so-called Main Line. You remember the movie—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, all that? That’s the Main Line. I remembered watching the movie on TV as a kid and wondering why they called it The Philadelphia Story, because they certainly couldn’t have filmed it in

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