Rubicon Beach: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

An obsessive man seeks a darkly beautiful girl, from a Los Angeles of an unnamed cataclysm, to a floating island, to the shores of Rubicon Beach where he at last reclaims his lost destiny

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fantasy, Literature, Science Fiction Fantasy, American

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

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

[tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

…I’d come to the geographical and temporal longitude where and when anything was possible, and that the accompanying latitude was in me: I was a walking latitude, finding its conjunction with the world’s last longitude…

Some writers sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Others sit down and dream. Nothing to it. Steve Erickson casts his nets within far and wide, transmitting captured dreams through his fingertips out into the world at large. A web of shadow prisms infiltrate receptive frequencies with images channeled from the depths of his un-collective conscious.

On this particular outing Erickson hangs three ornate chandeliers on gravity hooks in a pitch-black vacuum, spinning them as the interlocking multi-dimensional cogwheels that they are, all the while projecting condensed beams of inner light from various rotating angles through each individual chandelier crystal. Multitudes of refracted holograms coil and collide, spectrums dance and shift. Identities overlap, intertwine, merge and morph, only to pull apart again in the end. A single file exodus of water molecules leave the sea behind for bluer skies, abandoning shipwrecked sailors lured to these shores by a song now lost and no longer heard.

[Lukasz · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Rubicon Beach' reminded me of those old point-and-click adventure games. Your character wakes up in his room and goes on to explore the world beyond, moving between the scenes- one more surreal than the other, chatting up pixelated characters rooted to their respective spots, programmed to look like they are doing anything but waiting there for you.

Even though following the first anemic sub-chapters is a relatively familiar storyline, the whole book maintains that air of digital two-dimensionality and dreamy artifice throughout. Having found some of the kafkaesque elements rather off-putting, I let myself get sucked into Erickson's game anyway, and I'm glad I did. I'm giving it 5 stars not because it was consistently brilliant- it's because it was the book I've been wanting to read for a long time. Can't wait to read more of his.

[Ned Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rubicon Beach was a book I read in my 20s, and I living a post-college hand-to-mouth existence in the same Los Angeles Steve Erickson lived in (he worked as a film reviewer for the wonderful-at-the-time L.A. Weekly -- I taught school and wrote for a less prestigious alternative weekly).

I was reading a lot of Joan Didion at the time, alongside some old fashioned Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury SF. I was also writing my first novel, modeled after Pete Dexter's crystal-clear and lucid prose. So this was the context of my reading. (I know, I know, quite a combination.)

The book had a tremendous impact on me as an impressionistic fantastical dystopian novel that took my breath away with the way Erickson managed to insert genuine human emotion and pathos into a story that in other hands would have been your basic throwaway SF drama.

Erickson has this beautiful knack for interrupting his straightforward narrative with allusive mystical forays into dreamscapes and memories. In other hands, this would disrupt and destroy enjoyment of the flow of a book.

In Erickson's capable hands, the overall narrative becomes the richer and more meaningful for these asides. He is a marvelously constrained writer, with an eye for emotive detail and for the elisions of time and place and memory.

I recommend the book strongly, especially for those who love Cory Doctorow and his kind of writing.
This is the quintessential L.A. novel, and I still strongly recommend it. It cast a great shadow on me, and made an indelible, haunting impression, a penumbra I still can't shake.

I'm almost afraid to go back and read the book now, given that my life has changed so much, and given the fact that I haven't lived in L.A. for years. ((Any of you 20 year olds out there... let me know what you think of it now, would you? ;-))

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to the murky and surreal dreamscapes in which the novels of Steve Erickson unfold; abrupt shifts between person, time, gender, and identity are the hallmarks of the Los Angeles native, along with rich symbolism and a wickedly dark and understated sense-of-humour. Rubicon Beach begins with a man named Cale witnessing the unfolding of his own murder in a no-where-no-time Los Angeles that has been apocalyptically rendered into a community of islands, and from there the drugs get stronger and the plot more bizarre, switching at mid-stroke from the the titular shore to the crepuscular jungles of South America and a feminized Cale who deals with issues of slavery and escape, with a third act rendered within a haunted journey back through the railway-to-nowhere state-of-mind called America.

Weird, unsettling fiction by an author unlike any other. Erickson, in his second novel, already displayed a formidable talent.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

"It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dream of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same."

Esta es la quinta novela que leo de Steve Erickson y con todas he tenido la misma sensación una vez terminadas, que todo ha sido producto de un sueño: un sueño la novela en sí porque está narrada como si Erickson hubiese estado sumergido en un sueño y un sueño mi propia inmersión en ella. No es extraño por tanto que la historia y sus personajes sigan vagando en mi cabeza días, semanas y algunas veces, hasta años después, tal es la fuerza de algunos momentos. Las historias de Erickson son absorbentes, y en mi caso muy inmersivas, y está claro que quién se sumerja en ellas debe dejar de lado el raciocinio, la búsqueda de un argumento lineal y por supuesto obsesionarse por encajar las piezas del puzzle porque aunque todo pueda tener su sentido, está claro que hay que dejarse llevar por sus imágenes y por la experiencia, hasta sensorial, que su prosa produce cuando mezcla memoria y sueños con sucesos que no sabemos si realmente forman parte de la realidad. Este dejarse llevar trae consigo la dicotomía de hasta qué punto el lector se encontrará cómodo entre el conflicto entre realidad y ficción.

"I saw you because the flash of your camera kept going off in my face and it was driving me crazy. I kept thinking it was a storm. I kept thinking there was lightning in the room. It was that kind of light, like the sort you see only in the night, and I know that sort of light. I had many nights without any light, and when you've had those nights you don't forget when you've seen such a light..."

Imagino que el título de esta novela tiene que ver con “cruzar el Rubicón” esa metáfora que significa que hay un momento dado en el que hay que dar un paso definitivo e irreversible y que compromete al rumbo que tomará la vida a partir de entonces, en este caso este paso podría significar cruzar la frontera entre lo real y lo onírico. Y veremos esta playa en algún momento de la historia, momentos decisivos que el lector deberá reconocer cuando llegue el momento pero ya digo que Erickson no lo pone fácil, así que lo mejor es dejarse llevar por este sueño extraño y fascinante en forma de tres historias.

"These eyes watched him across the short distance of a small slough from beneath hair so black that in his delirium he took it for a mass o feathers, fallen from malevolent black birds plunging somewhere to their doom."

Aquí vuelve a ser un tema recurrente el hecho de que sus personajes busquen algo que aparece en sus sueños y que les hace avanzar, toda una contradicción con ese otro tema recurrente en Erickson del mundo en descomposición, convertido en una distopía rememorando de alguna forma ese sueño americano fallido, aquí representado en una América partida en dos partes. Y como en en el resto de sus historias, los personajes de Erickson no están quietos, están en continuo movimiento: Los Angeles, la jungla sudamericana, Mexico, Hollywood, el Chicago de la Depresión, Inglaterra..., son escenarios por los que veremos deambular los personajes de esta Rubicon Beach, escenarios entre distópicos e incluso mitológicos que se confunden con la realidad...personajes que aparecen y desaparecen entre las distintas lineas temporales, un pasado y un futuro que se mezcla casi sin fronteras entre ellos, espacios que nos recuerdan que pudieron existir pero que ahora aparecen inundados por las aguas, e incluso se puede decir que un personaje puede aparecer en otro tiempo o en otro espacio metamorfoseado en otro diferente…, pero todo está conectado por esos sueños que hacen avanzar montañas.

"I never understood the borders; they seemed to change all the time. They were borders of land and borders of years, but wherever and whenever they were, clearly, in that time and place I was born, it was America. Whether it still is I can't be sure. I'm not sure I' want to know."

Rubicon Beach está estructurada en tres partes, perfectamente diferenciadas con un personaje diferente como hilo conductor en cada una, tanto que podrían ser tres relatos diferentes si no fuera porque hay una serie de conexiones que las unen, objetos que se repiten en las tres historias y una mujer que es el sueño recurrente de los dos o tres hombres de estas historias.

"I am thirty- eight, thirty-nine. I look in a mirror and It tells me I'm fifty, fifty-five. My hair is the same color It has been since I was seventeen but my beard is white and my eyes are red. How did I get so damned tired?"

La primera parte, está ambientada en una Los Angeles distópica ("L.A. turned into a town of somnambulists."). El agua del mar ha convertido sus calles en canales y en lagos llenos de desperdicios con pájaros negros por doquier, un escenario postapocaliptico. El ruido es constante, con una música que suena continuamente de los edificios en ruinas, cada uno de ellos con una música que los identifica. Es un escenario en una América que ha hecho desaparecer a la que todos conocíamos: ahora es América Dos y que intenta borrar de la memoria esa America Uno. Cale cuenta en primera persona que cuando se mira al espejo se ve como un hombre de cincuenta y tantos cuando realmente tiene treinta y algo ¿por qué? ¿es ese reflejo en el espejo su auténtico yo, u otro??? Cale ha sido recientemente liberado de la cárcel y le envían a trabajar a una biblioteca, bajo vigilancia… Cale es una especie de preso politico y su memoria está en plena descomposicion, todo le da igual… sin embargo, hay un momento determinado en el que es testigo de cómo una misteriosa mujer decapita a alguien en una playa. A partir de aquí se obsesiona y cree verla en todas partes y se le aparece en sueños…

"What the'd taken to be her hair was simply that part of the night where there was no moon.""
[...]
"...but what he'd taken to be her hair was a once white wind gone mad in a caged place, gathering the smudge of the place's darkness; what he'd taken to be her mouth was the clotted snarl of the pale plains. What he took to be her eyes were only recollections, psychic mementos, talismans of distance: tones across the banck, a red moon of aspirations, small footsteps that lead to the water and vanish forever.""
[...]
Now I was standing here in the dark and I heard her voice and something ran up my back. Everything felt poised and alert and tense; and when she spoke to me she sounded spanish in my head."

La segunda parte tiene lugar en algún punto de Súdamerica en una tierra donde sus habitantes viven en los árboles. El hilo conductor de esta historia se centra en una joven cuyos ojos tienen el poder de iluminar el camino de los barcos que naufragan ("She dreamed of the night of the shipwreck. She wasn't certain this was her earliest memory but It was the earliest memory of which she was certain."). El rostro de la chica tiene la capacidad de hacer enmudecer a quien la ve por primera vez. Un marinero cuyo barco naufraga la secuestra y a partir de aquí la vida de esta chica se convierte en una especie de odisea hasta que consigue llegar hasta América, concretamente Los Angeles, la ciudad donde comenzó la novela. Allí recibe un nombre, Catherine y aunque intente camuflarse entre el resto, su físico es más una carga que una ventaja. Es una segunda parte en la que Erickson convierte la historia de Catherine en una huida constante: es una mujer que solo se comunica a través de su mirada, elusiva, misteriosa, que nunca ha visto su propio rostro reflejado hasta que no llega a América. Y es precisamente la mujer que se le aparece en sueños al Cale de la primera parte una y otra vez...

"Over all the months between the jungle and Los Angeles, over the thousands of miles, there was no telling how many hundreds of times her reflection must have flown past her in a mirror, or a window, or on a bright metallic surface. In entryways and pyramids, in the passage of place and time, opportunities abound for those who had never known her face. She had never know her face."

She was as unconscious of its existence as she was of her heart, of which one is aware only when one stops to listen for it. She'd never looked for the image of her face by which she blended into jungles and houses, by which she signaled ships and persuaded men to wager all the had."

En esta segunda sección en torno a Catherine, hay un personaje fascinante, quizás uno de esos personajes que se repiten una y otra vez en las novelas de Erickson, un hombre obsesionado por sus sueños, unos sueños que le fallan: Llewelly Edgar, que llegó hacia unos años a Los Angeles como poeta pero se ha vendido al mejor postor y escribe guiones en un Hollywood de mercadeo. Edgar al que le resulta prácticamente imposible escribir poemas y por eso se ha dedicado al cine, es cuando ve a Catherine por primera vez, empleada doméstica en su casa, cuando retoma un manuscrito de poemas y lo convierte no solo en su obsesión, sino en la resurección de esos sueños fallidos que había tenido.

“The less he saw of Catherine, the more he saw of her. The less he saw of her in his life, the more he saw of her in his head. He saw her in the places where he knew It was impossible for her to be. He was hounded by her captivity in his house, though he began to believe It was the house held captive by her."

La tercera parte está centrada en un nuevo personaje, Jack Mick Lake, que nace en Chicago en 1913. Jack es un genio de las matemáticas y es capaz de escuchar música de la tierra, pero su pasión por los números y la música mueren por culpa de un suceso traumático de su vida hasta que en 1950 y en Inglaterra conoce a una mujer que vive en un árbol ("I've been waiting in the tower, watching you."), y se cruza con el personaje de la primera parte, Cale. Es en esta tercera historia donde los tres personajes confluyen resolviéndose algunas de las preguntas que nos habíamos hecho anteriormente estableciendo los puntos de conexión, aunque no todo se resuelve porque Erickson construye su sueño fragmentado sin un principio ni un final.

"He didn't know what she saw in him, a small dark man, with heavy glasses. Perhaps she wasn't sure herself, unless it was the pain of his retreat and that he was a man who has sealed himself off from any more loss.
She was insightful enough to know that what some were unimaginative enough to call passivity might be a wounded stoicism, a life bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live."

Las novelas de Steve Erickson están formadas por momentos recurrentes que se repiten en diferentes fases dándole un significado nuevo y diferente en cada una de estas repeticiones porque el lector a medida que avanza tendrá más datos, pero es cierto que llegado un punto, estas visiones se convierten casi en símbolos de un estilo muy personal, mezcla entre ciencia ficción, distopía onírica, o géneros que confluyen creando un género nuevo y porque hay momentos fascinantes y que reconocemos en cada una de sus novelas: las estaciones de tren como puntos elipticos entre una era y otra, o entre un tiempo y otro, los canales que rodean una ciudad, los edificios identificados cada uno por su melodía, el color azul, el la caballera oscura de Catherine, el manuscrito de poemas de Edgar o ese río donde confluye todo. Se podría decir que aquí en Rubicon Beach el río es el simbolo de esos caminos abiertos, y dejar la playa y cruzar ese río, supone para Erickson el riesgo que supone la vida, y quizás pueda establecer los límites entre la locura y el raciocinio, entre los sueños y la realidad más dura. Hay en las novelas de Erickson, y en esta en particular, una melancolía soterrada, un ansía por esa búsqueda de lo imposible: ese idealismo que Erickson sabe ya desaparecido y que él ha convertido en nostalgia.

"Sometimes one must live half a lifetime before he understands the silences of half a lifetime before sometimes, if its someone like me."

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another pedestrian re-read of this author, who I am re-encountering after many years estrangement.
Our years apart have not served Erickson well. What I may have once declared in my youth as avant-garde masterstrokes now seem little more than wan and over-wrought meanderings.
If memory serves, I began with Erickson's "Arc d'X", his 4th novel so maybe these earlier ones are just weaker, as can often be the case with any writer. I will keep trying, though, since Erickson has always held a much-vaunted place in my pantheon of great American writers.
What can I say about "Beach"? A series of uninteresting wanderings of an ex-political prisoner in a flooded Los Angeles who just repeats the same thing to himself over and over again and has uninteresting things happen to him over and over again. Utterly lacking in logic, which is fine, it doesn't buttress that with anything to engage the reader's interest. The characters are hollow, the prose something perhaps once innovative, but now so overdone it seems stale.
Also, as a Seattle-area native, I must point out that Seattle does not, in fact, lie on the ocean...

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

My sixth Erickson novel but my first since about 2011. I’m not sure whether my appetite for his über-Slipstream dream narratives has diminished or whether this one was even gauzier and more liminal than e.g. Days Between Stations and The Sea Came In At Midnight. It’s in three sections: a recently-freed political prisoner in a reality-shifted, lagoon-pocked Los Angeles, put to work in an uncanny library and surveilled by the feds; an Indigenous girl from Brazil with a face too beautiful to contemplate and various other strange powers who makes her way to L.A. and ruins a washed-up screenwriter’s life; and a Midwestern mathematics savant who ends up living a lonely life in Cornwall until he meets protagonist #1 as an old man, and seemingly some version of witch-girl too. The symbolic intersections are just coherent enough to make a kind of dreamlike sense — and this is what Erickson is so infuriatingly good at, transmuting the anti-logic of dreams into prose. But the dystopic (not a word according to spellcheck and my wife) and fabulistic (probably also not a word) trappings – music coming from the earth, “America 1” and “America 2”, a finale like some variety of religious experience which is really just like all the other varieties of religious experience – don’t hang together much longer in the mind than any other dream. Whatever message about America or love or self-sabotage might be immanent in this blurred surreal triptych dissipates within an hour or two of turning the last page, i.e. waking up from the dream.

[Paul Eckert · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a book like Rubicon Beach, the story is what you make of it. Few events are clearly defined, character histories bleed into the dreams of other characters, and it’s almost impossible to tell what’s real. Sometimes this method of storytelling can be aggravating and is the defense of many a bad storyteller. But Rubicon Beach at least makes sense internally. Any confusion is not so much a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader with faux profundity as it is a landscape where the boundaries of reality and dreamscape are blurred, and neither experience can be declared “real.”

Any synopsis of this story would be an injustice, but here’s my attempt: The lives of a prisoner, an unsuccessful actor, a compromised writer, a mathematical savant, and a strikingly beautiful foreign girl interweave in the past, present, future, and dreamscapes of Los Angeles.

This book definitely deserves another read. Erickson’s writing is musical and poetic, each sentence with a hypnotic rhythm, and the sound of the words like the mysterious beauty of a foreign language.

This is probably one of my more vague reviews, but I don't want to impose my vision of what this story meant and ruin it for someone else. But I also don't want people to think the story is all intangible nonsense. The stories of each character have a clarity to them that resonates for each individual, but the ways in which they show up in other characters' stories are often the blurry line between reality and dream. And, perhaps, nightmare as well.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great bit of science fiction, beautifully written. As with other Erickson stories playful with the medium.

A story examining the parrallel yet different worlds of America. Is it a tale that intersects time or traverses parallel universes. That's up to you to decide.

Wonderful journey and one I'll need to read again.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shuffling the through the dreamlight and crepuscular dusk of life, the rubicon stands as a dividing line--can we go beyond into the vale and realize our full potential, or will we see it as a border, a barrier beyond which is nothing but death, an end? Steve Erickson's fictions move outside of time and logic, they're highly surreal affairs where character is fluid, plot is fluid, and the aesthetics of the moment make significance. Erickson is a true surrealist in the classical since of his need to juxtapose diametric things, binaries, inconsistencies, and clash them together. In his second novel, Rubicon Beach, he splashes murder against infatuation against disillusionment against geography against self-fulfillment. Broken into three parts, each constituent part is a self-contained arc with lingering motifs, character details, even dialog and thoughts woven through creating a vein of meaning coursing through each story.

In the first section, Cale--a recently paroled prisoner living in an alternate version of Los Angeles--is entranced by visions of a black haired woman with glowing eyes murdering a man, however, there is no murder. In his quest to find the woman, Cale discovers the strangest mystery of all: the identity of the man slain by the siren.

In Part Two, a South American woman is kidnapped from her village by a shell game conman who travels from town to town by boat, and swindles the locals out of their wealth by playing games of solitaire. Eventually, the young woman escapes her captivity and makes her way to America where she is promptly taken as a slave/housekeeper. Parallels are drawn to Catherine of Part Two and the murderess of Part One, and the home owner where she's captive is driven to a madness of his own.

The concluding section tells the story of a man who discovers a missing number that exists between nine and ten, and is set out to disprove himself, only to find there is only a way to disprove everything except the mysterious number's existence. In his life, the man meets an old gentleman living in England named Cale who speaks of a black haired woman they must find.

As the twining narratives tell an incomplete story of the protagonists, it's in the third section of the book where Erickson tells us the meaning of this book, of the title, "He was standing on the banks of a river listening to something from the other side, something he had never heard but had always known. And instead of crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned his back and returned the way he had come. And he's never heard it again. He should have crossed that river."

I don't want to parse this too much, because I think to do so would reduce it to platitude and cliche, but it is not cliche because it has power and echoing significance, resonant with the variegated lives of the three protagonists of the novel. In life we come to points of no return--and maybe time itself is that invisible barrier which we struggle to keep from crossing--but it's with courage and ambition that we do cross it, embrace life and light. What's on the other side? It could be absolution or it could be death, but to stand at the precipice, we learn not what exists in the gaping void beyond, but only the things we have already learned and know.

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a strange, surreal book. What starts out as a sort of dystopian post-apocalyptic mystery... doesn't stay that way for long. Some mild plot spoilers follow if you want a sense of just how strange it can get.

Soon there is a mysterious woman who may or may not exist outside the first character's mind, and hints at other worlds outside our own. The point of view switches to other characters, including aforementioned mysterious woman - revealing their backstory, and that they are indeed from a different world. This world might be closer to our own reality, but by this time you can't be too sure of anything. After another switch of perspective, the book comes to an ending which connects it to the beginning, sort of.

I was impressed by how readable I found a story that I was not clearly following. The details and descriptions of characters and places were compelling enough to make up for the fact that I wasn't entirely clear about what was happening or why. That's not to say the events of the story are random - on the contrary, the more you read the more connections you see between apparently unrelated parts of the plot. It felt a lot like exploring a giant spider web, where each strand is beautiful on it's own, but together multiple strands hint at something more. There is never a reveal or twist where the book shows you the entire web - indeed, I don't think you ever get to see all the strands. I expect readers will each get something different from this book because of how much interpretation is left open.

The journey you go on as you read the book was more significant than individual details of plot or characters, for me. It felt like exploring something truly different to the typical stories I'm used to. I doubt Erickson is the first or last to write books in this style, but it's new to me, and I found it a fascinating experience.

[Susan Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Huh? Not sure what this was about. Tried hard to like, but had trouble even finishing it. I hoped it would make more sense when I got to the finish line, which was hard enough to do, but I really had trouble finding a cohesive plot in this discursive story-telling. It was like a bad David Lynch movie.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Erickson is my new favorite writer. Rubicon Beach walks the line between fantasy and reality, if there is, in fact, such a line. The three sections of the book take place in different times and settings, and with different characters. Or do they? I had to pull out a pen and paper to take notes as I read, trying keep track of the similarities and recurring themes. Erickson's surreal style may not appeal to everyone, but to me, it's pure bliss.
Incidentally, this was not an easy book to find! My big-city library has only one copy, and it's kept in the Reference Library (no check-outs). I had to ask my professor husband to check it out of another university through inter-library loan. It was most definitely worth the effort.
There's nothing like the excitement of finding an author that blows your mind. It's like being in love. Sigh...

[Jon Glazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just re-read this novel after having read it at least twice in the 1980s. The first two sections are truly outstanding, but the last section was somewhat less powerful -- at least until the end. I just wasn't as emotionally engaged with the protagonist in that section of the book.

One of the most memorable events was when Catherine crosses an imaginary border into America at the intersection of Wilshire and Vermont in Los Angeles. I'll have to head up there soon to make my own journey across the Rubicon.

Every Erickson novel has a handful of sentences that sound awful when taken out of context, but that is because he takes far more risks than do most other novelists. If you are willing to read as passionately as Erickson writes, you should really enjoy this novel.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 2 out of 5]

A re-read. I bought this aeons ago when I was much younger, came across it on a shelf and thought to reread. I didn't finish it .

There are occasions when you come across a writer so gallus that they believe they are better than they are and big with it. Such is Erickson. Stick to writing film treatments, Steve. This is so badly written. It appears that the author thinks he's being SMART or cool writing obtuse narrative whilst trying to sound like some kind of cross between Chandler and Beckett. It doesn't work.

Second hand shelf.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first three novels by Erickson are dark, compelling, twisted fantasies of sex and death and lost dreams. The next three novels are pale imitations of the same thing. After that I lost track. But all you need to know is that this is one of the first three novels. Read it, or someone very like me might come out of the mist one day and chop off your head.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warren Ellis on RUBICON BEACH:

"Destruction’s Motor: RUBICON BEACH, Steve Erickson"

https://warrenellis.ltd/books/destruc...

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing book by an amazing, underrated author. Highly recommended.

[Gray Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

not as good as Zeroville.

merits: i liked how erickson ends his scenes; i liked how he writes dialogue starkly and efficiently; i liked how prior characters emerged in present scenes slowly, leaving the reader with an opportunity to recognize them lines before their identity is confirmed; i liked some of the figurative language used (only the portions that were fresh but also interpretable); i liked his characters, particularly those from Part II; i liked that each character seemed gripped with a "not-right"-ness, some more than others; i liked the deaths. i also liked some of the twists – like the blacked-out photos, the poems, the twenty-eight lights – and the consistencies/use of repetition.

shortcomings: the plot got a little bit lost; I felt like Catherine's character devolved in Part III. additionally Part III felt too floaty, which would've been fine had we continued the same POV of a previously established character, except we didn't (?). question mark because the substance of the book began to escape me around the start of Part III. the mathematician did not win me over; his numerical angst came off as pseudo-intellectual, but i won't hold it against this book too much because that's inevitable. i initially liked how Part III introduced a new setting that was consistent with the previous parts, but ended up greatly disliking the explicit-unreality angle that erickson decided on (i liked Angeloak okay, but would've liked it much better in a different book).

tldr: i generally liked the writing quality and use of language, but it's just a shame that the plot comes off as seeming like erickson took a really really long break between writing Part II and Part III.

[Stathis · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, let me quote Robert Ford's words from Westworld tv series:
"I've always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth."

Rubicon Beach would much support the above statement in a very poetic, alluring and dreamy way. I would interpret the whole story as the narrative of a decaying mind, by an ageing man ("there is a number for everything"), whose mind struggles really hard to put in line and recollect events he experienced and his mind engraved. Fears, passion, love, deprivation, and all emotional spectrum are still present in the decaying (or dreamy) mind, however, may be not attributed to exact facts experienced in the past.

So, it is all about remembrance and reminiscence after we cross a "biological Rubicon river" (dreams or dementia), where no point of return exists for logical or linear representation of past events and own memories. Then, internal war between reality and fiction is declared. At that point Steve Erickson crafts a masterpiece, leaving the reader own responsible for lining up facts, foggy memories, dreams and other adventures of the mind and body through time.

Impressive work by the author, a book definitely recommended!

[Mikko Saari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Ericksonia pitäisi suomentaa. Joku kunnianhimoinen suomentaja saisi Ericksonin vahvan runollisesta kielenkäytöstä herkullisen haasteen itselleen. Rubicon Beach on kolmas lukemani Erickson ja asettuu sopivasti puoliväliin: The Sea Came in at Midnight on edelleen suosikkini, mutta tämä miellytti enemmän kuin Days Between Stations.

Elementit ovat tutunoloisia: unelias ja unenomainen tunnelma, raunioitunut Los Angeles, mystisiä henkilöhahmoja – tällä kertaa nainen, joka ajaa kirjan miehet epätoivoon pelkällä olemassaolollaan. Kirja jakautuu kolmeen irralli­seen osaan, jotka kietoutuvat kuitenkin yhteen eri tavoin. Viimeinen kolman­nes oli kirjasta heikoin ja olisi ehkä kaivannut lisää tiukkuutta. Siinä missä The Sea Came in at Midnight napsui kasaan voimalla, Rubicon Beachin palapelin kohdalla saa miettiä, ovatko kaikki palat alunperin edes samasta pelistä.

Jos siis kaipaa selkeyttä ja loogisuutta, tämän kirjan kanssa ei pääse alkua pidemmälle. Ericksonia kehutaan omaperäiseksi visionääriksi, mikä tässä tarkoittaa ohueksi käynyttä kosketuspintaa todellisuuteen. Omalla kohdallani Ericksonin kirjat kulkevat rajalla: paljon hämärämpiä juttuja en enää välttä­mättä jaksaisi lukea, mutta nämä kutkuttavat mielikuvitusta sopivalla tavalla. Kaikkea ei tarvitse ymmärtää, asioita voi vain ottaa vastaan ja pyöritellä mielessään. (25.8.2008)

[ry · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm thirty-eight, thirty-nine," she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark Indianness in the darkness of the room. "I look in the mirror sometimes," he said, "and I think I'm fifty or fifty-five." He shook his head. "I don't know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me, that was when there was a number for everything. I couldn't imagine I'd ever feel this old and this tired." Now he leaned into the light of the candle. "It isn't your fault. It isn't that you're unbeautiful, it isn't that you don't deserve what you want. The humiliation is mine, not yours. In a musicless moor at the end of a numberless world all I can manage now is to grieve for what I once felt and for how much I felt it. How is it I'm so old now and I don't hear the music anymore, I don't find the numbers anymore?"

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The usual Steve Erickson elements: time loops, alternate histories, Hollywood, surrealism that starts off as metaphor before taking on its own life. Here he grapples with Inspiration, personifying it as a mysterious beautiful woman whose features become more obscure when you try to capture them. Trying to explain inspiration is a fool's game, and Erickson wisely sticks to the world orbiting the woman, though even as her gravitational power pushes and pulls people, the rare glimpses into her inner world are vague and shallow. The author has plenty of female characters across his oeuvre that men lust after, but his track record with giving them rich inner lives isn't great (see: Arc d'X). I'd say this is better than Arc d'X but not as good as Days Between Stations, but still undeniably a Steve Erickson book.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently came upon an old notebook with a couple of pages of handwritten one- or two-line reviews I wrote of all the books I read in 1989 and 90. Most of them I remember, but this one...it's like I never read it. I wrote "Surreal & futuristic story Los Angeles." No indication of whether I liked it or not, and I can't imagine what reason I had for reading it. I was kind of past my earlier years of sci fi binges and I was in college, overwhelmed with set reading. Huh. I doubt I'll re-read it to find out. One of life's little mysteries that just show me once again that I was a person I barely remember now.

[Geoffrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, but I'm giving this one one star. The first two parts, at least (and even the third, to an extent) are intriguing--intermittently fascinating--but they make for a singularly indigestible combination, and the ending--blah. I mean, I LIKE avant-garde literature, as my ratings here will attest, but here I kind of just wanted to tell Erickson "okay okay--you're good at being abstruse. We get it. Is there anything else here?"

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a tree by a river, it is out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers. .

Damn, what was that punchline?

[Charlotte Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe, you once said we live in silly times.

A beautiful journey through dreams, memory, and love. Captures the endless journey for that which we cannot reach, a face we cannot picture, but desire above all else.

[Chr*s Browning]

of all the vintage contemporaries i have read off cover design alone, this may be the most Vintage Contemporary Eighties Novel. has its moments but fails to cohere for me and to end like it does? i don’t think so

[Ron Anderson]

I read this when it came out in 1987...I have vague dream like images of a flooded LA of the future...I remember somewhat liking it...I would like to reread it.

[Rebecca Keller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly the most exhausting read I have ever experienced! While I can admire the concept & the imagery, I couldn’t wait to be done with it!