Dissonant Dispatches for a Disquiet Nation: On Steve Erickson’s Fiction

Describing Steve Erickson’s fiction is no easy task. He’s a writer who regularly wrestles with big ideas, but he’s equally at home getting under the skin of his characters, embracing their contradictions, their messiness, and their essential humanity. Among his greatest talents–and one that’s boldly on display in his latest novel, Shadowbahn–is his ability to explore uncomfortable moments in time, and to tap into what makes certain chapters in recent (and not-so-recent) history compelling, resonant, or discomfiting for so many of us.

All of which is to say that Shadowbahn opens with the World Trade Center re-appearing in a sparsely populated region of South Dakota a few years from now. It’s never really explained how this happens, and going too far into the mechanics of the unreal in an Erickson novel tends to miss the point. In Erickson’s fiction, timelines bifurcate; characters wake up in unfamiliar places and situations; and a kind of dream logic is paramount. (He’s also in the small category of writers who have been blurbed by Thomas Pynchon.) Even in his most nominally realistic novel, Zeroville–about an eccentric figure who wanders out of an isolated, almost monastic life and helps usher in an aesthetic revolution in 1970s Hollywood–there are surreal touches to be found.