$27.00
ISBN: 9780735212015
Availability: UNAVAILABLE
Published: Blue Rider Press - February 14th, 2017
It seems to me that Steve Erickson sees what the rest of us do not, or cannot, or don’t want to. Since his first novel came out in the mid-eighties, Erickson has been an apocalyptic visionary (and America’s most painfully underrated author). Each new book feels less like a standalone work and more like another truck stop along the narrative highway he’s been travelling his entire career. SHADOWBAHN is a surreal road novel in which the Twin Towers inexplicably appear in the middle of the Badlands and people travel from far and wide to see this bizarre spectacle. At the same time, SHADOWBAHN creates an alternate history of the second half of the twentieth century based on one hypothetical: what if Elvis Presley, not his twin, had died in childbirth? How does Erickson bring these two narratives together? Don’t ask; just read, and watch his American mythology grow denser with each page.
Plus, the five categories below:
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
After years of swearing off short story collections, I fell back in love with them in January, mostly because of these three books, which have very little in common except for the form and release dates. ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR is cluttered with shitty apartments and rundown motels, filled with women who smoke too much, drink too much, and fuck too much, while seeing their lives as grand things. THE MAN WHO SHOT MY EYE OUT IS DEAD embodies historical periods and different modes of storytelling, the author disappearing behind each in a ventriloquistic feat. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE? (actually published at the tail-end of 2016) posthumously collects the work of an author who explored race and gender as deftly as anyone ever has, although with a humor and dexterity that, at times, given the weight of her subject matter, seems unfathomable. These stories are short only in page count; they contain sad, lonely universes that, somehow, expand ever outward.
