Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations: In Brief

Steve Erickson is like the Pink Floyd of modern novelists,
and Days Between Stations is his Dark Side of the Moon.

1st printing

Erickson's debut from 1985 is one of the most gnostic of more contemporary novels I've encountered. I tried for about a month to explain it all in a real review, draft after crumpled draft, and finally cut my losses with the opening one-liner above.  I've never been able to adequately encapsulate any of the four novels of Steve Erickson's I've read -- the three others so far being Tours of the Black Clock, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Our Ecstatic Days -- but maybe that's a good thing, testament to the preternatural imagination and mysticism of Erickson's that permeates the spare pages of his mesmerizing novel's universe where "the clocks have all stopped" and mysterious rooms are self-lit without any known sources of electricity or natural light: these "stations" of the novel's title that serve only a select few hyper-attuned inhabitants of Paris and Los Angeles living simultaneously in the present and past; characters who may or may not be incarnations of characters who've lived before, people who "live in the window," as Erickson more eloquently describes it, and who have rediscovered a certain enigmatic and believed-to-be-unfinished film from the silent movie era, Adolphe Sarré's La Mort de Marat, possessing such unimaginable power that its very reel may serve as a metaphysical conduit -- a station itself -- between the ephemeral and eternal.  A person in possession of such a movie just might become immortal themselves!  Or maybe dead.

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Check out the website for Days Between Stations, the art rock band, inspired by Steve Erickson's novel.  Thanks to Sircle 6s, Mardi, of Paris and Los Angeles, a man who has been through a "station" himself, so to speak, for alerting me to this band and their music.