Steve Erickson

[Nathan]

Steve Erickson is both crazy and awesome. His first novel, Days Between Stations, really blew me away with its cross-generational characters and abstract symbolism (a wine bottle with a pair of blue eyes in it?), as well as the setting of mother nature gone wild (sandstorms ravaging Los Angeles, a deep-freeze so cold in Paris that people are burning whole buildings just to stay alive, a receding ocean so that Venice is now dry and the scene of a bicycle race where the riders end up riding around the empty canals and get lost due to an obscuring fog) and a woman who can call to cats (and they listen).

All in all, Days Between Stations is a very imaginative work that weaves two story threads (set about seventy years apart) together magically and blurs character identities in a unique way.

I'm going to read Rubicon Beach, his second work, soon, and I can't wait to start.

Anyone who likes Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Philip Dick, Thomas Pynchon or basically any other surreal writer should check out Steve Erickson. His work has been called "science fiction with out the science" and "in Steve Erickson's apocalyptic vision, the very scroll of history has been set on fire."

Note: not to be confused with fantasy author Steven Erikson...

 

[funes]

I read Rubicon Beach quite a while ago.
I really liked it, and think there is prob'ly a valid comparison to be made to Murakami. Several passages made it into my "common-place" book.
I've also read his book Tours of the Black Clock, which was somewhat harder to grasp.