I believe it's a very good book.

This novel took me by surprise in a way, I listened to the author talking about it in an interview on a radio show called Bookworm hosted by Michael Silverblatt and cool it sounded interesting, but I didn't think the quality of the writing itself, the care the author put in every page and the vivid characters and out-of-this world atmosphere would be so well-developed and in my view fully accomplished. Mr. Erickson has won a new admirer.

The trek of a reading adult is often a lonely and opaque one, only in the sense, that the course is personal and peers can only shrug and smile, but the path continues. I can say that if I could ever pen a piece of literary achievement, it would be Zeroville.

After sitting through James Franco's movie of the book a while back - which for me was somewhere between OK and terrible - I thought to myself that despite losing interest in the second half I did love the idea of a movie obsessed oddity with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head turning up in Hollywood in 1969 around the time of the Manson Murders, and thought there was good chance that the book is going to far superior to the film. And I was right. I really got into...

”On Vikar’s shaved head is tattooed the right and left lobes of his brain. One lobe is occupied by an extreme close-up of Elizabeth Taylor and the other by Montgomery Clift, their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other’s arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.” A Place in the Sun, what a movie! There are people who like it and those who dislike it, but none can deny...what a mo...

On the whole, this was a phenomenal book. It's all about movies, but also about punk music, hippies, madness, murder, blowjobs, surfing, Joan of Arc, god, forgiveness, wonder, and maybe even love. It lost one star for the ending, which I wouldn't usually do—by "ending" here, I mean literally the last three pages—but the more I've thought about it, the more upset those three pages have made me. It really does color the entire reading experience to have an ending that leaves you feeling unsettled

i want to say this is great, but it just didn't move me enough to be great. and i love steve erickson, but it's a much less...complicated plot than any i've read of his, which might be why i didn't engage in it fully. also i've never been a fan of the "inactive damaged forrest gumpy life swirls around it" hero. (yet i love hamlet...) i don't know - the sea came in at midnight is one of those books. i had an intense physical reaction to it. as it started coming together, there was a moment my hea...

Zeroville is a novel about art and the artist. Whether it be film, music or literature, it is an argument in support of true art over its simulacrum in mass media. It is a strange and surreal experience: there is the eternal battle of heaven and hell, parents killing their children (and vice versa), Abraham, Joan of Arc, strange encounters, mystical dreams and cryptic messages – what does it all mean? The novel treads a fine line between ambiguity and vagueness, sometimes straying more than a li...

It just seems... radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it's, you know... a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you're one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theatre with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can't be naked like that with strangers, you can't even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you're finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror fli...

This is weird. Most of the people who wrote reviews for this book loved it. I found it ok. I was interested enough to finish it 🙂

his plots have a comic-book-ness to them--if those comic books are the darkest and wildest of early era vertigo's or have the zaniness of first comics' AMERICAN FLAGG and BADGER. ...plots filled with the boyish wish fulfillment of sex and romantic alienation and isolating intelligence, all suffused with a self consciousness and self-regard about said wish fulfillment. ZEROVILLE's (seemingly) effortless epic goes on and on, doesn't let up for a moment, up to and including its spine-shivering fini...

Zeroville is what happens when a brilliant film critic writes a brilliant novel. Steve Erickson is the film critic for Los Angeles Magazine, and though I've never read any of his movie reviews I can't imagine he's anything less than brilliant based on the quality of the prose in this novel, and the comprehensive awareness on display of film history and culture. I have been experiencing a strange and thrilling serendipitous relationship with books recently, during which I have ceased choosing the...

Whoop yeah that was so good...a scruffy rollicking ode to cinema and L.A. Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, the Manson murders, blowies, Joan of Arc...we follow Vikar (like a punk Forrest Gump) (i know, sounds dreadful) through the late Sixties to the Eighties, this covers a lot of ground and it keeps drawing parallels between life and film and dream, ideas like continuity and the shape of time keep coming up, but it also just captures the feeling of decline, revolt, change in those eras reall...

An engaging, sometimes shocking, sometimes lyrical, mostly metaphorical journey, we follow Vikar, an emotionally-damaged, quasi-autistic man for a decade and a half in Los Angeles, from the summer of the Manson murders, until sometime in the early 80s. While almost Lynchian in its mysteries and revelations, this book still firmly sets its roots in reality (weaving the mythology of early-and-middle Hollywood) while allowing it’s symbolic wings unfurl and take flight. An interesting read, that oft...

ZEROVILLE strikes me as one of those masterworks in which a talent at its zenith catches hold of a theme that's its equal-- a subject that, in turn, snags the talent and puts it to a one-of-a-kind test. The Antaean struggle which results is a thing of beauty to watch. Erickson has produced a number of strange yet stellar booklength fictions, to be sure, and my favorite before this latest was TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, by any fair standard a major revisioning of recent history. But with ZEROVILLE