Expiration Date
core novel 1996 Fault Lines Trilogy
Record
| First published | 1996 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.86 (2,603 ratings, collected 2026-09-15) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780312860868 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
Set in 1992 Los Angeles, Expiration Date follows eleven-year-old Kootie Parganas and middle-aged Pete Sullivan, strangers who separately and unknowingly swallow the ghost of Thomas Edison, gaining unusual abilities along with dangerous attention. Their ingestion of the ghost, sought by occultists who consume spirits to prolong their own lives, makes them targets of predatory antagonists hunting for ghosts to devour for power and immortality. As Kootie flees his troubled home and Pete is drawn back into a world of small-time magic he had tried to leave behind, their paths converge amid a Los Angeles where ghosts linger in freeways, graveyards, and forgotten corners, and where surviving means learning to navigate a hidden economy of stolen spirits and desperate occult bargains.
Where it sits
- Universe: Fault Lines Trilogy
- Series: The Fault Lines Trilogy core; position 2 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Tim Powers
Notes
- From the series record (The Fault Lines Trilogy): A genuinely interconnected secret-history/urban-fantasy trilogy set in modern California, built on a tarot/Fisher King mythology, with recurring characters across all three; Earthquake Weather explicitly converges protagonists from both earlier books.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Fault Lines Trilogy: position 2 of 3: previous Last Call (1992) · next Earthquake Weather (1997)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Call_(novel)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expiration_Date_(Powers_novel)
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