My Two Sentences on Four Novels by Steve Erickson



Reading Steve Erickson's unsettling, reality-bending novels are like following the unscripted scripts of the most lucid yet opaque and intoxicating of dreams that make awakening so acutely depressing that mere consciousness, compared to the kaleidoscopic panorama of soul-fulfilling phantasmagoria comprising sleep and that's too soon evaporated after opening one's eyes, tantamount (thankfully for only a few grief-stricken seconds soon salved after several blinks) to losing everything.

 

I've never been disappointed by anything I've ever read of Steve Erickson's (four unforgettable novels so far) -- Days Between Stations (1985), Tours of the Black Clock (1989), The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), Our Ecstatic Days (2005) -- though I've been consistently confounded, even confused a time or two by what's been termed his "slipstream surrealistic" prose, which more reflects, I'm positive, my own inexpertise as a, nevertheless, hopefully maturing reader, rather than Erickson's unparalleled and arguably paranormal skills as an author.

 


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