Perhaps the most tedious and pretentious thing I've ever read. Every page made me angry. I kept wondering if at some climactic point all the fake profundity and pointless "structural experimentation" would be redeemed. It wasn't. The whole thing struck me as adolescent: Erickson's transparent goal to be original and dark and mysterious and indecipherable. In that sense, so self-referential. What Our Ecstatic Days wasn't was interesting or convincing. Why drag out a single uninterpretable sentenc...

The beautifully lyrical speculative fiction of Steve Erickson I think receives its apotheosis in Our Ecstatic Days. A lake springs up in Hollywood and spreads to engulf the center of the city. Fire and water. What Lynch does in film, Erickson does in fiction.

When asked periodically about good American authors, I always cite the abominably overlooked Steve Erickson. Erickson is a twisted, imaginative writer who fits into a Pynchony-Wallacey kind of nexus. That's why I was so surprised that this book was so terrible. In fact, in a highly unusual move, I actually had to stop reading it because I was so embarrassed by its badness. If you've read other, earlier Erickson books, you will be familiar with the plot: (fill in an apocalyptic environmental even...

Ravenous. Starving. Volatile for something absent in you.And then Steve Erickson: and your sick, tired heart learns to beat again, slowly at first, then accelerating, and you find yourself on the kitchen floor beside a half-eaten salad haphazardly thrown together while you kept the book in one hand, forearms on your knees, eyes flying over pages, and it's not quite the first read, when you couldn't breathe four years ago, no ---but there are moments when you know, you are just absolutely fucking...

I wish I hadn't waited a year and after reading The Sea Came In at Midnight to read this one, which is a sort of sequel. I think I'm going to have to read both of them again, one right after the other, to be able to properly absorb and process these strange and haunting books. And conveying the effect via reviews will almost certainly forever exceed my skills.

This is a beautiful novel. Not just the prose, but the concepts, the connections, and the descriptions of loss and fear. I can understand how it’s not for everyone. Before I had a kid I was very cynical about the connection between mother and child – so much so that this novel would have bored me to tears less than a year ago. But now, with a 6-month-old (who was sleeping on me for most of the time I was reading this novel), I understand exactly the fear Kristin expressed – the dread that just l...

This is literally one of the most beautiful and amazing books I have ever read. A novel with an experimental form, it reminds me of an EE Cummings poem, using the format of text to shape certain sequences within the novel. There is one scene in particular where a woman who can hear the sad songs of houses rides through a fictional hotel known as the hotel of thirteen losses where the text is shaped in such a way as to make it appear that one is traveling in between rooms in a hotel. The rooms th...

Is the point of a merry-go-round to grasp the brass ring? Do you focus on the ring as the calliope music swirls around you, ignoring the harmonic motion of up and down and round and round? Or is the point to dance with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the circus signs?If you are are a brass ring grasper, then this book is not for you. In your reading if you can handle being buffeted back and forth, and never really being on Terra Firma (like being in a silver gondola on a huge lake in the mi...

It helps to read some of his other books before this one, but if you surrender to it, I'm sure it's perfectly powerful on its own. He's played around with the idea of parallel selves and alternate realities in the past, and he really delves into it here, but not in a sci-fi/fantasy way. I always thought the alternate or "shadow" world that exists in his fiction was some sort of dream-reality created by the dark imagination of the century, or something like that, and maybe that still works, but t...

The ending - that is , the point at which the long sentence running throughout merges with the "main" text - is absolutely gorgeous. Although I enjoyed this, I think the metaphors should have been reined in a little bit; I can only deal with so much magic realism centered around creepy lakes as birth canals, red and blue juxtaposed to represent either gender, emotional states or menstrual flows, etc. I love all of those things, but I find it slightly irritating when male writers especially over-...

Alternately brilliant and frustrating. Erickson does some amazing stuff in this novel, both narratively and textually, including a stunning 230 page-long single-line sentence that completes and mirrors the text that surrounds it. But on the other hand, his writing is occasionally completely over the top and self-indulgent and he really needs to get a better rein on his metaphors (or needed to, anyway--Zeroville doesn't have this problem). I really loved the way he's able to abruptly shift viewpo...

A girl in my book club loaned this to me, because it's her favorite SF novel. I tried to read it, I really did. The first time I got about two pages in and gave up in disgust. I tried again a month later, and got 118 pages in before I just couldn't go on. The first 48 pages are in italics, which....why? I'm sure it's literary or some crap, but I need my books to be *interesting*, and the only character I was mildly interested in vanished. As far as I got it was mental wankery about having kids/m...

It's hard to say anything new about a sequel that wouldn't just be comparing it to the book it followed. As such, I'll say that I don't think it functions well as a standalone, despite Erickson's attempts to rehash the previous novel. This problem lies in the fact that much of the necessary background data is in the form of emotional connotation and not in storyline. Still, this book was also beautiful, and it was exactly what I needed at the time when I read it. To believe that I could die anyw...

Nobody writes like Steve Erickson. How can a writer so respected be so (relatively) unknown, under appreciated? Is it because he has been lumped (unfairly) in with the postmodernists, with DeLillo, Pynchon, etc. Pynchon is off doing his own thing, unlike anybody else (as is Erickson), and DeLillo is only recently approaching the kind of thing Erickson has always been doing.I reckon he was simply, sadly, a generation too early to be included in the weird fiction camp where he may have found a wid...

I liked what Erickson did with the shape and layout of the text. I particularly like how it worked at the ending. I found it a challenge to read, however.

Wow!

Reads like a dream you've had a thousand times. Also, the thing it does, yeah that thing, with the words on the page, down there, you know—that's fun too