Countdown (novel series)
novel series
Countdown is a young adult novel series by Daniel Ehrenhaft under the pen name Daniel Parker. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the series chronicles the year 1999 in short novels which represent individual months of the year. The series begins with January and follows the lives of its main characters through December.
Author
Daniel Parker is generally believed to be the pseudonym of young-adult fiction writer Daniel Parker Ehrenhaft (to whom the books are jointly copyrighted). Ehrenhaft is the author of numerous other young-adult books including The Wessex Papers (2003) under the pseudonym Daniel Parker and The Last Dog on Earth (2005) under the name Daniel Ehrenhaft among other titles. According to Ehrenhaft's website [1], the author currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Jessica.
Plot overview
As the new year dawns, a reported "massive solar flare" causes power failures all over the globe and adults and children everywhere to melt into piles of "black goo." Only young adults are spared, among them a quartet of drunken high school kids in suburban Seattle, two teens whose fake IDs have gained them entry to a New York City nightclub, a cocky young doctor in a Texas hospital, a pair of tough-talking inmates in a Pittsburgh jail, and Sarah and Joshua Levy who desperately search the ancient scroll of their granduncle Elijah for clues to the apocalyptic event.
Books
January
New Year's Day 1999 brings a strange solar flare, widescale power outages, and the death of everyone on Earth over twenty years old, leaving desperate teenagers to face the awakened Demon called Lilith.
February
One month into the new year, teenagers are left to fend for themselves as they realize that they not only need to out-live a plague, but each other as well.
March
April
After everyone on Earth over twenty dies, the awakened Demon called Lilith continues to spread her influence, while the teenagers chosen to stop her hope to unleash the power of an ancient encoded scroll.
“Countdown (novel series)” enters the record as novel series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Countdown, novel and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5176844. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2003 and 2005.
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