New Releases by Steve Erickson

A LA TIMES'' BEST BOOK OF 2017 (FICTION) “Gorgeous, compassionate, weird, unpredictable, alarmingly prescient . . . an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come." —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota two decades after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the tens of thousands drawn to the “American Stonehenge” — including Parker and Zema, siblings driving from L.A. to Michigan — the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. And on the ninety-third floor of the South Tower, Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived, suddenly awakes. Over the days and months and years to come, he’s driven mad by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn’t, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother’s place. So begins Shadowbahn, a kaleidoscopic, musical road-trip across the dreamscape of American destiny. Original and fearless in vision and form, Steve Erickson’s novel speaks to our current times, and to a nation “defiling its own great idea . . . the moment that idea was born.” “A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.” —Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods “Jaw-dropping. A tour-de-forcer’s tour de force.” —Jonathan Lethem, Granta

The novel that inspired the film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen: "One of a kind . . . a funny, unnervingly surreal page turner" ( Newsweek). Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review Zeroville centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him " cinéautistic." With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood—where he''s mistaken for a member of the Manson family and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—a task that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and "darkly funny," Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the 1970s and ''80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name ( Publishers Weekly). "Funny, disturbing, daring . . . dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish." — The New York Times Book Review "Magnificent." — The Believer "[A] writer who has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon." — Bookmarks Magazine "Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced." —Jonathan Lethem

In what the Guardian recently named one of the best literary debuts ever, a love triangle intersects with a lost film masterpiece and weather as turbulent as the heart Life stories converge and break away in Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson''s searing first novel. At the center is the tumultuous union between Jason and Lauren, who fall in love as youths in Kansas, and later relocate to San Francisco. A cyclist training for the Olympics, Jason is often abroad and unfaithful; Lauren, in turn, finds solace in Michel, a nightclub manager trying to reconnect with his past. Michel''s journey leads to The Death of Marat, a recovered lost masterwork of silent film directed by his grandfather, whose extraordinary life includes having grown up as an orphaned twin in a Parisian brothel. In a world shaped by sensuality and trauma, where sandstorms invade Los Angeles, the Seine freezes, bike racers vanish in Venice, and relationships are warped by amnesia, geological chaos and personal upheaval each wrenchingly reflect the other.

The course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as "Client X," which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed.

A "brilliant" novel about an alternate America that has been split in two ( San Francisco Chronicle). In a dystopian Los Angeles, Cale is a newly released political prisoner under surveillance. Beset by dark visions and relegated to working in a desolate library, he''s told, without explanation, that he''s "the one everyone''s looking for." For Catherine, a mysterious South American beauty, the crossing is no less extreme: Leaving her tribal life, she undergoes various confinements and escapes before winding up at the door of a Hollywood screenwriter. Finally Jack Mick Lake, possessed by numerology, must negotiate a river all his own. Stark and ethereal, Steve Erickson''s tales connect to form a luminous and passionate whole.

In a desperate effort to liberate herself, a fourteen-year-old slave—mistress to the man who invented America—finds herself flung into a different time and world Steve Erickson''s provocative reimagining of American history, Arc d''X begins with the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. With "skin . . . too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white," Sally is loved only to the extent that she can be possessed, and finds hope only in the promise that her children''s lives will be different from her own. The couple''s paradox-riven union echoes through the ages and in an alternate epoch where time plays by other rules. In Aeonopolis, a theocratic city at the foot of a volcano, priests seek to have Sally indicted, and in an emptied-out Berlin, the Wall is being rebuilt. Dizzyingly imaginative, Arc d''X is an unrivaled exploration of "the pursuit of happiness."

"If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one." — Salon It''s New Year''s Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients'' stories in a "memory hotel" designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself has a startling odyssey: Among other things, it involves answering a personal ad only to wind up imprisoned, naked, in an empty house presided over by a man known as the Occupant, hard at work on a millennial calendar that has serious implications for the future. The Sea Came in at Midnight is a breathtaking fable of redemption and one of Erickson''s most impressive visions to date.

Billions of dollars are lost from marketing plans that fail to get implemented properly. This book draws upon fresh research, new technology and decades of experience to help marketers improve their chances of success. it proposes a practical marketing navigation system to help businesses ensure their plan identifies risks and delivers targets.

"Set against the backdrop of Obama''s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country''s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl''s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past. Sweeping from 1960s London and ''70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold. "Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times." — The Boston Globe "Drama filled with exuberance." — The Washington Post "The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up." — The New York Times Book Review

Erickson continues the themes of millennial obsessions that preoccupied him in The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), this time in a lush, profoundly disorienting story saturated in metaphors of birth and apocalyptic decadence. As it opens, Kristin, who appeared in Sea, is a former rough chick made tender by motherhood. She lives in a hotel with her young son Kirk (short for Kierkegaard), on the edge of a lake (called Lake Zero, as in, you know, Ground Zero) that suddenly appeared and overtook much of downtown Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium.

Things are going all too well in the city of Quaint. So well, in fact, that something has to be done. The zeal for goodness can be catastrophic, and no-one knows this better than Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, two stalwart champions of all things bad. For the innumerable citizens of Quaint, driven to neurotic distraction and overwhelmed with good living, desperation breeds nefarious bed-mates, and before long the two homicidal necromancers - and their beleaguered and substance-addled manservant, Emancipor Reese - find themselves ensnared in a scheme to bring goodness into disrepute, if not utter ruination. To Reese''s bemusement, laudable motivations are, in a bizarre twist, uncharacteristically relevant to Master Bauchelain, although, of course, the payment of a chest filled with gold helps. Even so, sometimes, it turns out, one must bring down civilization... in the name of civilization.

A portrait of early-twenty-first-century Los Angeles and an American asylum is seen from the perspective of a narrator who lives on the edge of reality and brings together such characters as nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, and alienated movie critics

This exquisite and enchanting volume provides easy entry for newcomers to Neil Gaiman''s THE SANDMAN and to comics. Inside are the dreams of writers, fairies, felines and unemployed immortals, and the World Fantasy Award-winning tale A MIdsummer-Night''s Dream, which spotlights an unusual performance of William Shakespeare''s play. Sixth printing. Graphic novel format. Mature readers.