Deadly viruses that destroy... ... monsters above ground and below... ... alien invasions ... ... a child's gruesome revenge ... ... all lead to one ultimate end.
The Dying Days are here. No one can escape.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jeremy liked being outside, breathing the fresh air and feeling the slightly cool breeze of the warm Carolina night caress him. He lay shirtless, sprawled out on the wood of his deck, looking upwards at the night sky. The air smelt of the freshly mowed grass of his yard below and the portable stereo beside him belted out the chorus to Rush's "Working Man".
He supposed he should be feeling sleepy as late it was. He glanced at his watch, its bright green display showing the numbers 1:58. The witching hour was long gone, but he didn't feel tired at all. In fact, he felt pumped up and wide awake. He leaned over and hit the skip button on the stereo. "Fly by Night" replaced "Working Man" and he smiled. His heart pounded in his chest. He couldn't explain it but for some reason he felt on edge, eager. He lay back down and listened to the music.
Astronomy was not normally one of his interests, but tonight the sky seemed different. The stars pulsed hotter burning in the blackness above. It wasn't something he could explain, it was just a feeling that he couldn't shake.
His hand reached out into the darkness beside the stereo and lifted his mug of sweet tea to his lips as he arched his back up a bit to sip it. In that moment, the world changed. The darkness was replaced by a piercing light, like lightning dancing across the summer sky. The whole sky seemed to go white. He dropped his tea, cursing as its coolness splashed over his naked chest. The light hurt his eyes and only seemed to grow in intensity. Simultaneously the alarm of his wrist watch went off as the stereo erupted into a shower sparks. Geddy Lee's voice shrieked upwards as the volume rose and then went silent. Beneath the deck his car came to life. Its horn honked randomly as its headlights lit up and blew out. The shards of glass clinked onto the gravel of the driveway like rain.
Jeremy screamed then, but as abruptly as it had come, the light was gone. Spots lingered before his eyes, purples and greens swirling. His head pounded as if someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. His temples throbbed and his hand reached out, fumbling for the deck's railing until he managed to grasp it and pull himself to his feet. As his vision cleared, the world was black around him. The stars seemed to have vanished from the sky. The lights everywhere were merely gone. His neighbors' houses on the distant hills were invisible in the darkness. Even the normal specks of moving headlights on 1-40 still farther away below the mountains were missing.
He stumbled across the deck to the sliding glass door of his bedroom and went inside, flipping on the light switch. Nothing happened though he flipped the switch twice more. Bumping his way from the bedroom to the kitchen, he managed to reach the drawers of the island in front of the sink. He yanked the top drawer open, wrapped his fingers around the plastic of the emergency flashlight he kept there. His thumb pressed it on, but still the dark remained. He angrily bashed the light atop the island and shook it, but it didn't come on. He threw it aside and felt his way along the island to where the phone hung on the wall. As he guessed, it was dead. His cell was too.
An irrepressible fear began to grow within him. Sweat beaded on his sticky skin mixing with the remnants of the spilt tea. He stumbled his way back to the bedroom's large walk-in closest and entered it. He pulled his hunting rifle down from a shelf as his knees gave way and dropped onto the carpeted floor. "Jesus, almighty," he whispered, "what the Hell is going on?"
He shoved a bullet into the rifle's waiting chamber and jerked the chamber closed. Pulling his legs close to his chest, he sank back against the closet's wall to wait for the dawn, his knuckles white as he held the rifle.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Spellbound by the Dark Mage of Death,
By
This review is from: Dying Days (Paperback)
This book of short stories put out by Eric Brown is his best work so far. A newcomer to writing about the dark side of life, he is quickly emerging as one of the best. My favorite story is called "The Return", bringing an interesting twist to the end of our mortal lives and touching on how intertwined our immortal souls are to it. His longest story, "Dying Days" focuses on the aftermath of an mysterious "wave" that the earth passes through. The book is full of short stories for everyone that enjoys the tales of death and chaos that could strike our lives at any minute.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dying days,
By Lee Pletzers "www.leepletzers.net" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dying Days (Paperback)
Eric S. Brown, 29 years old, is an author with an active imagination. In his collection: Dying Days, you'll find 19 tales of horror and cross-genres. All the stories are quite short, a few were perhaps too short to really get into the characters and the settings. Most of the stories were `telling' more than showing, which robbed me of any feelings towards the huge cast of characters.
In the Introduction, Jason Brannon tells us the end is coming and introduces us the mage called Eric S. Brown and this collection. Jason's introduction was awesome, and pumped me up to read the collection as quickly as I could. Eric seems to like to cross genres. "To Reach the Gates of Alavon", one of my favorites in this collection, contains cross-dimensional travel, aliens, mythic warriors and a group on a quest that was fun to read. It is one of the longer stories in this collection at 10 pages. Another great story is "The Return", a great story but it needs work to make us feel for Jack. There was no emotion to follow his realization. A good thing was the vision of reckoning day. This story had little show, and apart from Jack the rest of the cast were 2D at best. Quite a few of the stories contain futuristic elements making the collection part SF / part horror. Some of the `talk' needs to be improved, but he's a new guy (to this reviewer at least), so mistakes aside (yes there are a couple, not big but noticeable), this first collection is a great start for the young writer. Most readers will find 5 or 6 stories they love in this book and these stories make the $11.95 asking price well worth it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nineteen autopsies,
By
This review is from: Dying Days (Paperback)
DYING DAYS is an impressive collection of short stories by a young writer from North Carolina named Eric S. Brown. A lifelong fan of horror novels and zombie movies, Brown first began publishing his short fiction in various online and print magazines in 2001. Since that time, Brown has managed to amass a sizable body of work. In the fall of 2003, Silver Lake Publishing released this collection (available in both print and electronic formats), which represents the best of Brown's work to date.A connective sinew of narrative and stylistic similarities runs through the stories of DYING DAYS, making the collection read more like a short meditative novel rather than a group of independent stories. In DYING DAYS, Brown reveals an almost morbid fascination with the ends of things. As a storyteller, he works with the post-mortem precision of a coroner, cutting through bone and laying bare gristle to reveal the grotesque mysteries hidden in inner cavities. Each story is like a mini-autopsy: you pretty much know from the get-go that all hope has long since been abandoned, but you're still morbidly curious to piece together the reasons why. Brown's stories allow the reader the perverse thrill of experiencing the life-affirming process of discovery within the contradictory medium of death. Although the nineteen stories making up DYING DAYS are certainly all cut from the same cloth, Brown makes each story unique enough to keep the collection interesting. Probably most satisfying is the variety of emphases in stories with a common theme. With end-of-the-world stories such as the titular "Dying Days" and "The Return," Brown dissects the corpse of the large, and with stories such as "Preservation of the Species," which focuses on the death of identity and perception, he also trains his scalpel on the corpse of the small. Eric S. Brown is a talented young writer, with hopefully much great work ahead of him. In the stories that make up DYING DAYS, Brown reveals a focused ability to tease out a single theme, and also shows himself surprisingly capable, for a new writer, of handling the heavy machineries of plot and suspense with something like old-hat panache. DYING DAYS is by no means a perfect work. Some of the stories could have benefitted from more detail to character, but this is something Brown can perfect in his future stories and novels. He obviously has the drive and desire to keep creating better fiction, and DYING DAYS stands as a testiment to how far he's already come in such a short time.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
