Our Ecstatic Days

Kristin #2

by Steve Erickson

In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother commits a desperate convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, she determines to stop it and becomes the lake's Dominatrix-Oracle, "the Queen of the Zed Night." Acclaimed by many critics as Steve Erickson's greatest novel, Our Ecstatic Days takes place on the forbidden landscape of a defiant heart.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Ebooks, 21st Century

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels: Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d'X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, Zeroville, These Dreams of You and Shadowbahn. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock, and currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

in the realm of things that make no sense, allow me to submit the following: why is the sequel to one of the best books i have ever read in print, but not its predecessor?? seriously harpercollins, give up the goods! if you don't want to print it anymore, give it to simon and schuster so i don't all the time have to be telling people, "yeah, it's good, but you should read The Sea Came in at Midnight first. really." that's just losing sales for poor s&s, but i stand by it, in the interests of Making Readers Happy.

i remember the heart-shaking anticipation with which i curled around this book - hoping to recapture some of the first-kiss excitement that The Sea Came in at Midnight rocketed through me. alas - no thigh-quivers, but still a book better than most. and all y'all recently bitching about foer's gimmicks would be well-advised to stay away from this one. i don't mind gimmicks as long as the author has the skills to contain them and avoid letting them run the show. but there's nothing wrong, to my thinking, with novelty, playfulness, innovation, as long as it's not all flash with no meat. karen likes meat. (sorry, foer) this book will have its fun; its quicksand plot, its shifting plateaus, its peekaboo characters. it's a fractured lynchian book with character-doubling, shifts in location/time/reality, and a sentence bisecting the prose from page 83 to 315...it's far more confusing than SCIAM, but it is more of a mood piece; primarily the tender precariousness of new parenthood and the apprehension and selflessness it requires. it's a wonderful followup to sea, but i cannot express how essential it is to read the first one. trust me, you will send me valentines for this recommendation.

a taste?

And as they grow closer to the door, the song becomes louder. As they reach the plain unadorned door it's so distinct now it frightens her, and she's about to cry out to the boy and tell him to stop when he takes the door knob in his hand and opens it. Out of it roars a music that's more than pain, more than anguish, more than desolation, more than sorrow, more than grief. Out of it roars the greatest of all losses, the loss that can't be endured. It's not a loss that one truly survives let alone surmounts, it's not a loss that one out-exists let alone outlives; it's the loss that breaks your heart and it never mends. It never mends. It calls into question everything, so that it entails in some way all the other losses: home is lost; fortune and livelihood have no more meaning; love not only has no more meaning but becomes a kind of emotional treason; faith becomes a kind of spiritual treason; dignity becomes a joke; the soul is forever in the terminal grip of a psychic cancer; health is an affront; the loss of a parent is the perverse twin of this loss, like the reflection in the mirror of a funhouse; freedom is a curse; life is torture. Memory is worst of all. From the doorway of this tiny closet or pantry one would almost gladly flee, if possible, to the Suite of Lost Memory, or failing to reach that, perhaps even the Suite of Lost Life. This is the Unendurable Loss because it involves the one thing that one loves more than one's own life; and no meaning that one strives to give her own life; however great or good, can ever truly compensate for what's been lost, will ever be truly convincing in any scheme of things that in the heart of hearts one believes. This loss is the essence of the universe's impossibility, it's the one thing for which a benevolent God never has a persuasive answer, and which a malevolent God holds over the head of humanity.

it's a scootch purple, but i love it.

come to my blog!

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

The uterine life so cruelly taken—and then so miraculously restored—in a memory-starved Tokyo during the final pages of The Sea Came in at Midnight provides the central pivot for the multiple dream passages in which the principal personalities interact and intersect, hurt and heal, as Our Ecstatic Days weaves its undulating spell upon the reader. Never has Erickson so masterfully steered his ship of the surreal and the exotic across the benighted oceans of consciousness, wherein lurks the wonders and horrors that emerge at regular intervals in his uniquely American brand of fiction.

Kristin, bearing the seed of the Occupant, the cartographer of apocalypse, returns to Los Angeles early in her resurrected pregnancy. Taking every opportunity to expose her swelling belly to the world—and thus to its inherent and sovereign chaos—she is amongst the first to notice the brackish pool of water bubbling forth alongside a Hollywood intersection. Within a short period of time, the middling puddle has become a steadily-rising lake—coined Lake Zed—submerging large parts of Los Angeles beneath its bluish-hued waters and turning multi-storied apartments and hotels into cube-shaped island sanctuaries, an archipelago of human edifice against nature's relentless innovations. Kristin gives birth to a boy, Kierkegaard Kirk Blumenthal, the Wildman—straw-haired, emerald-eyed, a beautifully mysterious product of her own once dream-starved, chaos-focussed body, and her response to her unanswered query What is missing from the world?. Paralyzed at times by her overwhelming love for her child, skirting the penumbral marches of fear induced by the overwhelming forces the universe—wielding the world and its invisible marker, time—can bring to bear against her vulnerable offspring, Kristin becomes convinced that the Lake has come into being solely to claim the boy. Resolving to combat this watery enemy, she abandons Kirk in a silver gondola in order to plunge into the lake and seek its source: to make a bargain with a God that, like all such compacts made with omnipotence, will require sacrifice and tribulation beyond all measure; the endurance of pain in the now for the promise of salvation in the future. Horrified when she ascends, lungs bursting, to the lake's surface only to find her child has disappeared, Kristin will return to the source of the lake—a birth canal connecting mirror worlds, through which she will trace her journey in an agonized stream-of-consciousness even as events unfold in the looping time of the ebb-and-rise of Los Angeles' partial inundation. Kristin's alternate self, Lulu Blu, will become the oracle-dominatrix of Zed Lake, while Kirk and his unborn/born twin, Brontë—the daughter of Third-Reich pornographer Banning Jainlight—and Wang, the infamous Chinese stalwart who stood as an everyman bastion against the track-laid progress of governmental tanks in Tiananmen Square, will enact their own path-crossing destiny in a future America where blue is fading from the world, replaced by reds and grays that paint an apocalyptic coating upon a frightened and fractured nation where everything is isolated and everyone is alone.

Where The Sea Came in at Midnight was about chaos and the destructive search for self-affirmation, Our Ecstatic Days is a mournful melody about loss: the loss of the individual self into the unique unity forged by the bond of flesh and blood between parent and child; the loss of complacency on the part of the former to a barrage of dread, born of an awareness of their offspring's fragility in the potent clutches of a hostile world; the loss that accompanies love in all of its manifestations, brought about by betrayal, misunderstanding, estrangement, the progression and regression of an abstract time and the ever-present claims of death on lovers, family, and friends; and the loss of a spiritual surety aligned to the divine, to life's ordained purpose, and the ensuing rituals of dominance and submission that exert their insistent pull upon the fleeing remnants of faith pursued by chaos and its random hunger. The waters of Zed Lake are, in essence, the liquid distillation of all of the trials and terrors and triumphant joys of parenthood. Erickson expressively captures that wellspring of seesaw emotions bestirred in mothers and fathers with the emergence of children as another factor in a bemusing world—and the surpassing strength of the urge to control so many aspects of their child's life in a desperate attempt to shield them, though such straightening bonds tend to lead astray, to create ghosts that return at unexpected intervals to haunt with an unwelcome persistence.

Erickson is a uniquely gifted writer, and though he can be guilty of overburdening his prose with purplish ballasts, he rises above his faults through the overall poignancy of his storytelling and his ability to effortlessly depict the utterly bizarre and hallucinatory streams of his fertile imagination—using music particularly as an emotive and thematic driving force. The Sea Came in at Midnight was leaner and more chaotically focussed, but the standalone sequel surpasses its sibling with its ambitions successfully realized as the various suppurating wounds inflicted by loss and pain and grief across differing avenues of existence are sutured with a cleansing break through the placid surface waters of a Zed Lake flickering with shades of a resurgent blue.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ravenous. Starving. Volatile for something absent in you.
And then Steve Erickson: and your sick, tired heart learns to beat again, slowly at first, then accelerating, and you find yourself on the kitchen floor beside a half-eaten salad haphazardly thrown together while you kept the book in one hand, forearms on your knees, eyes flying over pages, and it's not quite the first read, when you couldn't breathe four years ago, no ---

but there are moments when you know, you are just absolutely fucking certain, that your cells are rejecting the stasis in you, they are revolting, and as your eyes ravage his sentences, you feel your throat pulsing, your guts clenching, your eyes vibrating, your heart exploding. You are not the same as you were then, but fuck, but jesus fuck, you are not the same as you were when you started the book.

And it was only ever his words.





Steve Erickson should be fucking sainted.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sequel to Steve Erickson’s electric The Sea Came in at Midnight, 2005’s Our Ecstatic Days is also a culmination of all of Erickon’s novels to the point of its publication. In it, Erickson’s surrealist impulses are magnified and deepened with a sense of textual playfulness that translates into some toying with how pages are formatted—nothing too funky, just a purposeful use of italics, center justifications here and there, a single sentence yawning across two-thirds of the novel, bifurcating the text of every page in its wake, and some hallway passages via gondola that narrow and shift across the physical page. And, as ever, we have the shifting sense of time, place, and experience as the characters double and loopback on each other while the narrative pulses forward, unfurling new characters whose connections don’t make logical sense in a physical world, but through Erickson’s deft hand, ultimately recombine in elucidating yet bewildering ways.

At the open, Kristin, the young memory hotel worker from The Sea Came in at Midnight has birthed a child named Kirk. Having moved back to Los Angeles from Tokyo after the events of the previous novel, the main thrust of the story begins with a lake appearing in Hollywood where Kristin and Kirk live. At first filling gradually, the water soon grows to be a broad lake that has made islands of the buildings and skyscrapers tall enough to poke up through its rising surface. Taking Kirk out on the water in a gondola, the boy drops his favorite toy into the depths, and, thinking the lake seeks to steal Kirk away from her, Kristin dives in to rescue the toy. Upon returning to the surface moments later, the toy unretrievable, she finds the boy is gone. Destroyed by grief, Kristin dives deeper into the water looking for Kirk, and traverses a kind of wormhole in the bottom of the lake to enter an alternate universe where she dons the name Lulu Blu and lives a life as a dominatrix. Meanwhile, other characters circulate, like Wang who appears to be Tank Man of Tiananmen Square notoriety, now fighting in a vague war that seems to be a new Civil War in America, and Brontë, the unborn twin of Kirk who exists in this alternate world and takes up the family business from Lulu.

As other characters and places from past Erickson novels emerge, Our Ecstatic Days feels like a culmination of his surreal vision of a fin de siècle America (as viewed through the lens of California). These recurrences, such as Tours of the Black Clock protagonist Banning Jainlight, appearing rend time from its conventional ticking in order to weave a web of psychic and emotional connection rather than one rooted specifically in the natural order. But beyond those typical tricks, Erickson seems to be directly focused on how grief afflicts us all, and the ways and forms in which grief enters our lives. The most remarkable and deeply human section of the novel details Kristin qua Lulu’s descent through an “island” in the lake where she must pass through the thirteen rooms of loss. Each room’s architecture and energy evokes and embodies the feelings of the different forms of human loss, including home, fortune, livelihood and more, culminating in some of the most poignant and unendurable losses of all.

One reading an Erickson novel must give themselves up to the meandering flow of the narrative’s dreamy logic, and allow it time to answer your questions, like “who is this new character?” and “how do the connect back to the main frame of the narrative?” The answers are never direct, but as you should expect from any highly skilled novelist, there’s sufficient information for the reader to become a participant in realizing the narrative’s wholeness. Having read all of Erickson’s novels up to this point, I think the only thing I would change about my experience would be to read his work in chronological order to get the full sweep of the characters and places that meld into Our Ecstatic Days. As ever, if you’re a fan of the works of the likes of David Lynch, Mark Z. Danielewski, Thomas Pynchon, Helen DeWitt, or others, Erickson is a natural fit for you—can’t wait to see what else he may bring into this world yet.

[Jon Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this a few weeks ago. This is such a sad, beautiful book. It's the fifth Erickson novel I've read, and in none of the others does his vivid magical realism work so well with his gorgeous, elegiac prose.

A massive lake has risen in the center of Los Angeles, creating a setting of profound psychological and political possibilities and meanings.

It probably helps to start with his previous novel, The Sea Came in at Midnight, as this is a continuation of the story of the central character. I must say it also has a special resonance for me, being an L.A. native. I've got a lot more Erickson to catch up on.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I hadn't waited a year and after reading The Sea Came In at Midnight to read this one, which is a sort of sequel. I think I'm going to have to read both of them again, one right after the other, to be able to properly absorb and process these strange and haunting books. And conveying the effect via reviews will almost certainly forever exceed my skills.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beautifully lyrical speculative fiction of Steve Erickson I think receives its apotheosis in Our Ecstatic Days. A lake springs up in Hollywood and spreads to engulf the center of the city. Fire and water. What Lynch does in film, Erickson does in fiction.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I figured out why I struggled to finish this book over and over despite loving, or at least really enjoying, all of Erickson's other novels.

I just didn't like it.

It felt like "too much". Just too clever. I had a similar reaction to Danielewski's Only Revolutions - maybe I just dislike goofing around with structure. (and yet The Raw Shark Texts was great!)

I don't have to worry about being an Erickson completist now, or a slavish fan. Kind of a relief.

[Splashconception · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is literally one of the most beautiful and amazing books I have ever read. A novel with an experimental form, it reminds me of an EE Cummings poem, using the format of text to shape certain sequences within the novel. There is one scene in particular where a woman who can hear the sad songs of houses rides through a fictional hotel known as the hotel of thirteen losses where the text is shaped in such a way as to make it appear that one is traveling in between rooms in a hotel. The rooms themselves are wonderful metaphorical masterpieces; their is the room for loss of freedom, which is extremely comfortable and hospitable, so comfortable that you don't want to leave and the room gets almost imperceptibly smaller over time, until it is so small that you are suffocating. The room of lost love is full of mirrors that distort and change shape because love is a reflection of the ego or self.
The story is about a woman who loses her son, or dreams of losing her son, or the loss of children in general, or the chaos of the world, or a woman who loses her son and then finds her son. Sound confusing? That's because the novel works on so many different levels simultaneously and not until the end of the novel do you realize how Steve almost imperceptibly weaves everything together: there is the lake that forms in the middle of Los Angeles, the is the child Kirk who is left on the gondola and adopted by a family of owls, there is the man with the hole in his hand who fell in love with a Kristen e who is not the same Kristen that swam to the center of the lake and into the hole that is the birth canal of another lake. There is Kristen the dominatrix who makes a slave out of God because he takes children away from their mothers. This book is surreal, magical and generally just fucking amazing. Stop reading this bullshit review and start reading the book already.

[Larry Massaro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps the most tedious and pretentious thing I've ever read. Every page made me angry. I kept wondering if at some climactic point all the fake profundity and pointless "structural experimentation" would be redeemed. It wasn't. The whole thing struck me as adolescent: Erickson's transparent goal to be original and dark and mysterious and indecipherable. In that sense, so self-referential. What Our Ecstatic Days wasn't was interesting or convincing. Why drag out a single uninterpretable sentence for pages and pages and pages? Why arrange description on an otherwise blank page into some typographic shape? Why put some text in all italics? Why have some series of pages contain only single words? And this typographical exhibitionism could be forgiven if the story and characters were believable and meaningful, but they weren't. I didn't for a second suspend disbelief, care what was going to happen next, care about the fates of such unlikable characters. They were glaringly unreal. Nor did I believe in the visual environment of the book. It had all the contrivance of a movie set, all concept, no heart.

It's amazing to me how many reviews of this book are glowing, by people who find Erickson's prose beautiful and moving. I'm mystified. The few other negative reviews on here reacted to it the way I did. What was the point?

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternately brilliant and frustrating. Erickson does some amazing stuff in this novel, both narratively and textually, including a stunning 230 page-long single-line sentence that completes and mirrors the text that surrounds it. But on the other hand, his writing is occasionally completely over the top and self-indulgent and he really needs to get a better rein on his metaphors (or needed to, anyway--Zeroville doesn't have this problem). I really loved the way he's able to abruptly shift viewpoints and introduce important new characters without regard to conventional narrative techniques. As close to a 4th-person writing style as I've ever encountered. Worth reading, for sure.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flat out beautiful. This is a deep examination into grief without the intention of just being depressing. An insightful look at feeling lost to the world.

Surreal and magical. Despite being overly indulgent it never drags and keep a quick lilt pulling the reader farther into this "world".

If you are into dreamy postmodern fiction, this is as good as it gets.

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 2 out of 5]

Steve Erickson's worst novel.

Having read seven of Erickson's other novels, I thought I knew what to expect. To some extent, Erickson is an "expect the unexpected" kind of author, but that can be narrowed somewhat. Set in L.A., apocalyptic events, alternate histories... all par the course for Erickson. And while Our Ecstatic Days has some of what I enjoyed about his other novels, it has too much of what I didn't enjoy.

His meditations, which I enjoy in smaller doses, crowded the pages of OED. His experimental arrangement of text, which are sometimes fun, didn't feel altogether necessary here. The perspectives of his characters, otherwise delivered with clear intention, here competed with his meditations to crowd OED and together left me feeling suffocated.

If during your reading of any Erickson novel, you found yourself wanting more rambling meditation, more experimental text arrangements, and/or more irrelevant insights into what the characters are thinking or feeling, then Our Ecstatic Days is the novel for you.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful novel. Not just the prose, but the concepts, the connections, and the descriptions of loss and fear.

I can understand how it’s not for everyone. Before I had a kid I was very cynical about the connection between mother and child – so much so that this novel would have bored me to tears less than a year ago. But now, with a 6-month-old (who was sleeping on me for most of the time I was reading this novel), I understand exactly the fear Kristin expressed – the dread that just lingers in the background of your mind at almost all times, whispering that you’re just not lucky enough to get to keep the beautiful, amazing thing that you created – that something is going to snatch it from you. Or maybe it’s just me and Kristin in the novel who feel this way, but I could identify with her concerns. There were other sections of the novel that I enjoyed (Bronte’s story was probably my favourite) and the rest were interesting if not amazing.

I didn’t love the novel – it was a little convoluted at times, some of the metaphorical scenes ran a little long, and I felt like I was missing something at some parts (specifically that there was an allusion made that I hadn't picked up on). And despite Erickson doing a good job with his female characters, the focus on menstruation and motherhood felt a bit like “a man writing a novel about a woman” to me rather than an authentically female story. We're not just about blood and babies.

Overall though, if you enjoy stylistic, intriguing novels where not everything is explained to you, you’ll likely like this one. I thought it was beautifully done and very much enjoyed it.

I found this novel at a used book store and thought it was Steven Erikson (fantasy author) writing a fiction and bought it for that reason, but now I’m glad to have found Steve Erikson instead.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody writes like Steve Erickson. How can a writer so respected be so (relatively) unknown, under appreciated? Is it because he has been lumped (unfairly) in with the postmodernists, with DeLillo, Pynchon, etc. Pynchon is off doing his own thing, unlike anybody else (as is Erickson), and DeLillo is only recently approaching the kind of thing Erickson has always been doing.
I reckon he was simply, sadly, a generation too early to be included in the weird fiction camp where he may have found a wider, albeit still niche, audience. Think M John Harrison, Vandermeer, Cisco, when they’re not working in more overt Fantasy realms.
Anyway, this book is incredible. Erickson reaches for something nobody else is even aware of, and mostly hits it. There’s nobody else doing what he does. Closest I can think of are film makers (Lynch, Herzog, Roeg, Refn) or musicians (Scott Walker, Bowie?).
Nobodies books look like Steve Erickson’s either. The short paragraphs or ‘cuts’ in Zeroville, the twinned paragraphs and columns in Shadowbahn, the chunks of white space to signal a chapter break (sometimes numbered, often not), randomly sized, so that chapters do not start on any specific point in the page (say, right hand side, about a third down) but instead the white space swims about his novels. This book does that too but also has a single sentence that swims through the rest of the book and joins up with the main text on the third to last page. Some of this one is in italics, some left, centre or fully justified.
Erickson often makes me think of the book snoopy was writing throughout Peanuts, the way his narratives split, fragment and diverge... It occurs to me that his novels are almost like several linked novellas under the same cover. I wonder if he would have been more palatable to a large audience of packaged this way?
Another astounding novel. Genuine physical emotional response at the climax. The man is a genius.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is the point of a merry-go-round to grasp the brass ring? Do you focus on the ring as the calliope music swirls around you, ignoring the harmonic motion of up and down and round and round? Or is the point to dance with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the circus signs?

If you are are a brass ring grasper, then this book is not for you. In your reading if you can handle being buffeted back and forth, and never really being on Terra Firma (like being in a silver gondola on a huge lake in the middle of LA) then this is your book. "Our Ecstatic Days" will not be reduced to the level of "here is what this book is really about." There are threads, motifs, places, sounds, colors and words that are present throughout the novel which are like beacons on a lake - they guide you to places, but I'm not sure getting to the places is the point of reading this book. Instead it is the experience of unraveling and revealing Erickson's journey(s) that is important.

The important experiences for me in reading this book was losing myself in a Los Angeles dreamscape that has a Bergmanian touch of metaphor, in reading about the love of mothers for their children, for letting go of their love and fighting for it back. It is also strangely appropriate that I finished this book on Easter - a day when blood red skies have vanished, when all is forgiven and a certain mother's son has risen from the depths.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 1 out of 5]

When asked periodically about good American authors, I always cite the abominably overlooked Steve Erickson. Erickson is a twisted, imaginative writer who fits into a Pynchony-Wallacey kind of nexus. That's why I was so surprised that this book was so terrible. In fact, in a highly unusual move, I actually had to stop reading it because I was so embarrassed by its badness. If you've read other, earlier Erickson books, you will be familiar with the plot: (fill in an apocalyptic environmental event) begins to envelop Los Angeles/the world, tesseracty thick temporal things happen, a struggling writer (often outrightly named Erickson) is featured, lot of sex, etc., etc. This book falls so neatly into the Erickson formula that I was downright annoyed that he couldn't conjure up anything better. Any mystique or sense of amused bemusement his other works could bring to me was dead here. Very self-referential, to the point of nausea. Sigh...

[Unwisely · Rating 1 out of 5]

A girl in my book club loaned this to me, because it's her favorite SF novel. I tried to read it, I really did. The first time I got about two pages in and gave up in disgust. I tried again a month later, and got 118 pages in before I just couldn't go on.

The first 48 pages are in italics, which....why? I'm sure it's literary or some crap, but I need my books to be *interesting*, and the only character I was mildly interested in vanished. As far as I got it was mental wankery about having kids/menstruation, and then some S&M stuff. I think that's a sign that it's supposed to be deep? Clearly it was over my head. Also excruciatingly dull. Ugh.

[Danger Kallisti · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to say anything new about a sequel that wouldn't just be comparing it to the book it followed. As such, I'll say that I don't think it functions well as a standalone, despite Erickson's attempts to rehash the previous novel. This problem lies in the fact that much of the necessary background data is in the form of emotional connotation and not in storyline. Still, this book was also beautiful, and it was exactly what I needed at the time when I read it. To believe that I could die anywhere but “on the lake” would be a lie for me just as much as it was for the protagonist.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly heartbreaking in a way I didn't expect. Emotions running rampant through the novel, the narrative adds to the reader's consuming confusion, hopelessness, and general sinking feeling. Whatever pleasure I previously gleaned from imagining Los Angeles ablaze was extinguished when the gas station on Crescent Heights disappeared beneath the murky water. It knocked the wind out of me.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left me dizzy, giddy, elated, depressed. Erickson can pack and turn a phrase like no other, make you see, hear, feel creeped out. I couldn't put it down, but, be warned: not for people who insist their novels should bear a resemblance to the world they know. Realism isn't Erickson's point. Oh, this picks up sometime after The Sea Came in at Midnight left off

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Experimental and not one of my favorites. I knew from reading this book that something had changed and maybe Erickson had had a child, (he had), I knew it from the very start because he was suddenly writing like someone who loved as a parent does.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked what Erickson did with the shape and layout of the text. I particularly like how it worked at the ending. I found it a challenge to read, however.

[Kim Zinkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

[Benjamin Bond West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a dream you've had a thousand times.

Also, the thing it does, yeah that thing, with the words on the page, down there, you know—that's fun too

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i dont understand it. that long sentence was confusing and the entire novel is written so pretentiously.

it has a beautiful ending, though.
(idk who was the woman?)

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erickson with this work has become master of the surreal. All of his works have been working, building towards this moment and, in effect, make an appearance in some fashion within the narrative. As surrealist as the novel is, it is also an experimental work, one that is not always successful, not in terms of its power or necessity but its sustainability. In the hands of lesser artist, this would have been a complete mess. Erickson's ability and confidence in both his words, characters and narrative make this a good work, hinting at a possible greatness not yet realized.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as The Sea Came In At Midnight, secretly i think Steve Erikson is a woman, it makes me think of a quote from "as good as it gets" when Jack Nicholson is asked how he writes women so well he answers "First I think of a man... then I take away reason, and accountability." not so much with Erikson.

<3

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was blown away by Zeroville and Days Between Stations. This one is kind of losing me in the middle when it gets to the part about the mistress and the guy from China, but I am only half way through. Maybe he'll win me back? As always the writing itself both rocks my world and blows my mind and also makes me a little jealous.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mesmerizing and strange. It reminded me of a David Lynch movie - spiraling realities, dreamlike cadence, and stories with flexible interpretations. There was a chunk of pages towards the end that floundered, but mostly it's tightly and beautifully written. If you like literature that experiments a bit, both in narrative and structure, I'd definitely recommend this book.