It’s a rhythm and blues from the future that’s spiraled round the sphere of time to come back up through its birth canal.Before I could react, a hood thrown over my head, my person shoved from behind into a waiting ghost van peeling a smokescreen so thick no two witnesses report seeing the same thing. Coming to, dazed on the cusp of a deep canyon near an abandoned bridge spanning a thin blue thread nestled below, the only thought I can muster to wonder aloud: all this from reading a book?Standin...

post-read: Ooh boy, Steve Erickson is so superb. This was really different than I expected (read: really different from Zeroville ); it was hyper-realistic, not at all stylized, with really normal, messy characters grappling with kind of huge issues—race, adoption, debt, historical precedent, what it means to be American, stuff like that. But then it was also somehow in pieces and a little bit twistily meta—our main character is also a writer, who is kind of writing a story that has things th...

NOTE: Reading back over this review five years later in 2017, this book has taken on the feel of an elegy, with Shadowbahn, perhaps unwittingly the first major novel of the Trump era, its apocalyptic successor. Just read the excerpt I pulled out toward the end of the review; it makes my heart hurt. ------This review was first published by The New York Journal of Books in 2012. I reproduce it here. I also named it my favorite book of that year, with additional thoughts here.“Here are we, one magi...

Roughly 70 pages into the novel These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson I was ready to boldly proclaim it the best book of 2012. It had much of what I so frequently look for in a novel–believable characters, social commentary, a suspenseful plot, and touches of avant-gard aesthetics that don’t bog down the whole. By the end of the book, I wasn’t so sure it was still the best of the year–due in part to occasional middling portions, but also due to the upcoming releases by Martin Amis, Michael Chabo...

Steve Erickson is the reason I wanted to go to Kansas. He's the only reason I'd like to visit L.A. He's part of the reason I want to visit Berlin, and now he has made me want to go to Addis Ababa. But only if those places are the alternate versions that appear in his novels (yes, with violent muggings and all). For me, there's the canon of Erickson that is pre-me-knowing-it-existed, and then there's the post-me-knowing-he-existed publications. I feel like the latter are more grounded in real wor...

A typical family novel These Dreams of You is Not. It's more like a turbocharged, falling apart, break down, can-the-family-get-back-together-again kind of story. Or looking at it from another angle: can America get back together again?My favorite quote:"This is the occupational hazard of being of my country, the way one's identity becomes bound up with a landscape that manifests in its soil and psychitecture an idea, with a people still fighting over who they are because when nothing else is he...

However way you look at it, this is an excellent novel. It's biggest issue lies in the fact that it's not what I expected from Erickson. It's Erickson on meandering cruise-control. The ingredients are high-quality and parts of the book resemble the genius that is Steve Erickson but in the end it's one of his lesser novels. It's no Zeroville, Sea Came in at Midnight, or Days Between Stations.I believe this is best framed under the concept of a journal/meditation of the condition of modern day Ame...

I have always been a big fan of Steve Erickson's writing but I find his latest book underwhelming to say the least. As always with Erickson this is an easy read, taking you along at high speed through the pages. But the content of the writing is less rewarding to me than in his previous novels. Where his prose used to be delightfully weird and forceful, in this novel at times it is downright mushy ("and there against the light of the outer hall are two silhouettes that need no light other than t...

I really liked Zeroville - so much so that I feel that I was constantly judging These Dreams of You by the the high precedent that Zeroville set for me a Erickson books. This has so much potential, and the narrative style that I so enjoy from Erickson's work, but the end really fell apart for me. So many interesting things were going on right up until the last few sections, and then the end felt just felt flat to me. Really, this should probably be a 3.5, but I feel that even though it wasn't as...

"Sometimes life calls for a catalytic instant." I needed one, and I got it.For the first half, I felt like I was having cobwebs wrapped around my brain. Although I was enjoying it and was absorbed by the writing, I didn't think would go past four stars. Then at some point, I started to notice that the cobwebs intersected in strange places, that they weren't just round my brain anymore but everywhere else as well, that they left burning scratches in the places where they came together, and that t...

I’ve long been a fan of Steve Erickson’s film criticism and my first foray into his novels did not disappoint. I loved Zeroville, which I read a couple of months ago, which didn’t really surprise me, although the intensity of the whole experience was more than I’d hoped for. But this. This! These Dreams of You pushed so many of my particular buttons all at once, it’s wonder I didn’t have a stroke. Part of the appeal was personal, but the quality of the work more objectively (if there is such a

frustrating! the writing is often gorgeous, the plot is swirling and complex, and the book... largely annoying. on paper everything seems like it should be right down my alley, enough so that i keep returning despite continuing frustration. here are the problems i've had with erickson here and before - he builds small novels out of big stories, where everything winds together too close, too narrow; he draws in history and historical characters but the never feel more than a little bit human; his...

I had just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog when I saw Steve Erickson’s Zeroville on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I took a chance on the novel, on the Europa logo alone. It has been a few years, but I remember enjoying Zeroville except for the fact that my knowledge of early cinema and Hollywood stars was slightly less than up to par. With that as background, I approached “These Dreams of You” cautiously, hoping that the author gave me a few more recognizable signposts and that he managed...

A name that is as damaged as it is spellbinding - Actually really enjoyed this book, even if the book's layout is just ANNOYING

This is a simple story, written in elegant and elaborate prose. It’s loaded with introspection and analysis. I was struck by the fact that every character in the book was so compelling that an entire book could be written about any one of them. The story moved along at a pace that was perfect for me. As a baby boomer I could identify with every theme, the civil rights movement in the 1960’s, politics of the 60’s and the 2000’s, music and musicians, the housing bubble and recession of the 2000’s,...

This guy is amazing. And, so luckily, I feel like we enjoy/care about all the same things. This one is full of exciting political and musical cameos that I couldn't believe meshed as well as they did. It's an ambitious novel and it might not completely live up to its ambition, but that's what makes it so interesting.