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 ClockThe 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 SarrĂ©'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.

~~~

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.


Comments

  1. Excellent review written here; after reading this and having our literary talk last weekend, you have influenced and inspired me to get the book. So I just bought the hardcover 1985 - 1st edition on ebay $17 + shipping = $21. Steve has an interesting website also.

    More over, I found a band called "Days Between Stations" named after the book. They consider themselves to be "Art Rock"

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  2. Thanks Mardi brah! I'll trade you my battered and marked up Vintage ed. for your first. Deal?

    I'm going to have to go check out that band. And yeah, Erickson's website really captures well his unique style.

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  3. Seems as though Thomas Pynchon would agree with you. I just read his blurb about it. High praise indeed! Another addition to my ever-growing TBR list.

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  4. Pynchon has blurbed a couple of Erickson's novels, Bubba. I'd be lying if I didn't say that his high praise wasn't one of the deciding factors for my diving into Erickson's universe.

    I've added a link in the post to the rock band, Days Between Stations, that's worth a look if "art rock" style music is your thing ...

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