My ex-boyfriend recommended this to me and apparently I'm still taking his book recommendations. I love literary novels that take place in off-kilter worlds--here, strange climatic events such as sandstorms and shrinking seas provide the background--but I don't love when the characters themselves stop acting/reacting like real people. On almost every page a thought or image made me go, "Umm, sorry, but I don't buy that he/she's thinking that at all right now." Yes, these thoughts and images were...

The segments about film are fascinating for anyone interested in cinema, but a better source of Erickson's movie thoughts is his recent novel Zeroville. I do kinda like what Erickson does here with the dystopian background, which is that he keeps it in the background. Kinda like in Children of Men, how the camera is constantly moving and showing us glimpses of frightening destruction, but it's never really the point of the foreground action. But frankly most of this book stinks, especially the r...

"You got Pynchon in my sci fi!""You got sci fi in my Pynchon!""I hate Pynchon!""Go to hell! This is delicious!""I don't know, pretty bland and incoherent to me.""Well, do you want the rest of my big ol' bucket o' Pynchon? I gots some rainbow gravity, some Mason-Dixon...""NO FOOKIN THANKS!""OK then just give our accident two stars.""Yeah that's what I just did, Steve-O."

Erickson is one of those polarizing authors whom I seem to love while other people are driven away. It's hard to deny the surreal, dreamlike quality of his stories; in fact, the best way for me to describe this book is to say that "it was like reading a dream". The world slowly disintegrates about the main characters. Cities fall inexplicably into ruin. Herds of white buffalo foretell vague portents. Time falls out of joint and a young couple falls apart.I originally picked up this novel after n...

Erickson's first novel set the stage for the themes, scapes, and styles that would recur throughout his later books, and showed him already firmly in control of his own particularly effective and evocative surreal strokes layered upon a textual canvas. Within a world in which the elements themselves are affected by the emotional turmoil of the principal characters, in which select colour schemes interpose themselves across time and space upon both nature and the products of man's labour, Erickso...

Days Between Stations is a book of strange loves at the onset of the strange times…This desire was so lacking in her that she was afraid to reach down inside herself for one passionate connection, because she was sure that passion would be just the thing by which she’d bring everything to a close; she didn’t have even the passion for dying. She spent long hours smoking dope, and by seven at night when the fog came in from the sea she’d get up from the bed to open the window; and lying back on th...

The Believer says that Erickson's a master of defamiliarizing us from our worlds; how this differs from say, science fiction or fantasy is that Erickson purposefully creates a fully realistic world like our own, just slightly askew. This is a risk inasmuch as it was for the Latin American Magic Realists (who I could never get into): what is your dividing line between reality and fantasy? If your characters exist in a world recognizable to any reader, then any diversion from this will reassert th...

Discovering Steve Erickson's writing has been one of the great surprises of this year. I first read "Zeroville" which is his most recent work and what may be positioning him for a larger audience... Probably his most accessible. This is his first... strikingly similar in many ways. Different in many others. Reading both one gets the sense that Erickson feels the larger body of his work is all interconnected. Characters and scenes drift from novel to novel just as they do across centuries and oce...

Thomas Pynchon isn't exactly a heavy blurber, so when I saw his rapturous blurb for this 1986 book, I decided to give it a look, even though I'd never heard of the author. Holy cow, how could I never have heard of this author? I have since learned he's been championed by Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Richard Powers. This, his first book, is just about perfect - a melancholy meditation on identity, romance, apocalypse, and silent film. The main plot hinges on a a mysterious f...

Uneven. That's my ultimate word on this book. The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them. This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface. I've read his Th...

I come to DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS, Steve Erickson's debut novel, hot on the heels of having read SHADOWBAHN, his most recent (and rumored to be last). Though thirty-two years separate the publication of the two books and though they are formally quite distinct from one another, one can find in DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS a fully developed sensibility that would remain evidenced in Erickson's later fictions. While the two later Ericksons I have read present themselves as a kind of staccato series of prop...

Periodically I revisit authors I first read long ago and that I've never returned to. I read all of Erickson's works many years ago, and have, over those years, recommended him and touted him to countless acquaintances as a woefully overlooked (by the mainstream) author of many gifts. There is something unsatisfying and wilting in reviewing the fervor of youth, when literature catapulted you off your ass and maybe even drove you to write yourself. Maybe it's best to just let them lie in your mem...

Having only ever read The Sea Came In At Midnight and detect a fluid, yet discursive narrative style that I’m eager to see whether it casts across his writing in general. The books were written fourteen years apart (published, rather, 1985 vs. 1999) and the narrative digressions are breezier with the earlier book. There’s an amazing concatenation of character strands that fascinated me in The Sea Came In At Midnight (as much as it didn’t quite satisfy as a whole) that suggests a more mature writ...

This could have been a really good book but it wasn't. Instead it was just a confusing read. People seem to describe it "sensual" and "erotic"...nah. More like devoid of any real emotion or substance, coupled with odd male fantasies of playing with insentient dolls. The badly written sex scenes ruined it for me, they were so ridiculous and stupid to the point of not being even funny or entertaining. "He pulled her to him and it was only about ten minutes later, so fixed was she on the blue and t...

Sepand of the duo Days Between Stations recommend this book and gifted me a copy in 2007. Here is from an email I sent including my thoughts on the book:Hi Sepand ... I agree with you about DBS coming in and out of focus. I prefer now to think of it as vignettes that can be taken in isolation, even though I know them to be related. That is, I am drinking my pleasure from each chapter as if it were an isolated dish, though the theme and presentation of the buffet may elude me on this reading. Som...