Dying Days is a collection of short stories by prolific writer Eric S. Brown. Each revolves around a death, and we're given nineteen different slices of death to chew on.

The collection begins with the title story, an epic tale of the end of the world. An energy wave hits the earth and destroys communications, power, everything that makes us civilised. And it also causes madness in over 90% of the population...

A couple of the stories feel incomplete, like they're more of a prologue to the real action. This is due in part to the fact that they're written from the point of view of the person who dies, and so must end when they do. Dwellers of Oar Knob and Inside Iowa are prime examples of this, setting up an interesting situation, then dying too soon...

Other stories worth a special mention are The Return, a tale of alien invasion, and more importantly, a man's chance for redemption; Wendigo as reprinted in Dark Fire Issue 4; and The Horrors of War, an unusual use of vampires, still managing to capture the fun of undeath.

My own particular favourites from the collection are Sorrow and Unnatural Endings. Sorrow is the story of a spaceship's crash landing, and how the craft's survivors blend in and study the local inhabitants. And what goes wrong, of course. Unnatural Endings is the final tale of the collection, and follows two soldiers suffering the undeath forced upon them by the standard issue regenerative nanovirus supposed to protect them and speed healing. It's a fitting end; the perfect short, sharp story to close with.

Like in Poisoned Graves, reviewed in Dark Fire Issue 7, viruses and the living dead are features common to a number of the stories in Dying Days. Nanobots also make quite a few appearances, keeping characters alive beyond their normal span.

Dying Days contains typical Eric S. Brown stories, with zombies, killers, military forces, unnatural viruses, and of course, plenty of death. If you've read Brown's stories before--and I'm sure you've come across them somewhere, so widely published is he, then you'll know what to expect and won't be disappointed.

Dying Days is available from Silver Lake Publishing and Amazon now, ISBN: 193109571X