Customer Reviews

Dying Days

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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.

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.

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.

Eric S. Brown proves to be one of the strongest young voices in horror in his first solo collection - Dying Days. The title novella takes on a familiar theme, with a surprising twist. The writing lags a bit here and there, and it could've been improved with more action and less telling. Maybe spice up the dialogue, too. After the satisfying novella come several tasty tales of terror, each one unique in its own frightening and clever way. It seems that this book could have been improved quite a bit by an extra proofread and some futher editing. But, a satisfying read and a good book.

I usually don't waste a lot of time writing these Amazon reviews but I really feel I must warn other would-be customers. This has got to be one of the most amateur collection of short stories I've ever read. Poorly written, badly edited, no follow through on any of the ideas presented and basically just shallow material. You can't even really call them stories cuz they are all only about 2-3 pages long. All of the tales in this mini-book are completely formulaic. I was really disapointed with this one. For a good zombie/apocalypse story read, "Every Sigh, the End" . I'm only half way though the book and it is already turning out to be one of the best zombie books I've ever read.