Black Clock # 10

Black Clock #10

by Steve Erickson (editor), Bruce Bauman (editor)

Born out of the despair of the Great Depression, flourishing in the first radioactive blush of the nuclear age, noir is more than just a style, it's a sensibility. Black Clock 10 operates on the premise that Twenty-First Century noir is a mutated genre still bearing kinship with the original.

In Black Clock 10, Robert Polito traces early signs of noir back to Eighteenth Century America in "It Would Be a Queer World If," and Dana Spiotta takes a look at one of the classic Fifties film noirs in "First is First, Second is Nobody." In Diana Wagman's "The Five Elements of Noir," some noir archetypes find the movie they're in has taken them over. The genre gets decidedly weird with Michael Ventura's cross-dressing private-eye in "One Marilyn Too Many," and becomes altogether supernatural in stories by Denise Hamilton and Francesca Lia Block. Amid work by major contemporary authors Scott Bradfield, Brian Evenson, Geoff Nicholson and others. Black Clock 10 also identifies 70 essential noir movies, novels, comics, poems, paintings, performances and pieces of music.

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Steve Erickson is a distinguished American novelist known for a visionary, dream-fueled style that blends European modernism with American pulp and postmodernism. Raised in Los Angeles, he studied film and political philosophy at UCLA, influences that permeate celebrated works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, and Zeroville. Critics, including Greil Marcus, have labeled him "the only authentic American surrealist," placing him in the lineage of Pynchon and DeLillo. His most acclaimed novel, Shadowbahn, was hailed as a masterpiece even prior to its release and was later adapted for BBC Radio. A "writer’s writer," Erickson has published ten novels translated into over a dozen languages, consistently appearing on best-of-the-year lists for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Erickson served for fourteen years as the founding editor of the journal Black Clock and is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.