Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson (b. 29 April 1950) was born in Santa Monica, California. He studied at UCLA and has worked as a film critic (notably for Los Angeles magazine and the Los Angeles Times), a journalist, and a professor. He founded Black Clock, a literary journal published by CalArts, where he teaches in the School of Critical Studies. He is not to be confused with the fantasy novelist Steven Erikson (note the spelling).

Life and Career

Erickson’s ten novels form a sustained, singular body of work in which American history — Jefferson and Hemings, the Civil War, Hollywood, the millennium, 9/11 — is reimagined as dreamscape. His America is always apocalyptic: flooded, fractured, burning, or dissolving into alternate timelines.

Days Between Stations (1985) — a hallucinatory novel moving between contemporary Los Angeles and Venice, Italy, incorporating a lost silent film — was his debut. Rubicon Beach (1986) braided three narratives across different eras. Tours of the Black Clock (1989) — about a pornographer from the American heartland who is recruited to write sexual fantasies for Adolf Hitler, fantasies that begin to reshape history — established his central method: a narrative logic closer to dreams than to realism, in which time is nonlinear, geography shifts, and national myths recur in distorted forms.

Arc d’X (1993) is widely considered his masterwork. Centred on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings — the founding sexual and racial contradiction of the American republic — the novel spirals outward through alternate Americas: a near-future Los Angeles, a Berlin-like city called Aeonopolis, a collapsing technological utopia. Jefferson and Hemings recur across these settings, their relationship endlessly re-enacted. The novel argues that America is built on a foundational act of desire and coercion that it can never escape.

The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999) was a millennial apocalypse novel about a girl who sells her virginity and a man who is compiling a calendar of the twentieth century’s atrocities. Our Ecstatic Days (2005) — about a lake that appears in the middle of Los Angeles, slowly rising to drown the city — includes a spiralling typographic river of text that runs through the pages, the only time Erickson’s visionary content has been matched by visual form.

Zeroville (2007) follows Vikar, a shaven-headed cinephile who arrives in 1969 Hollywood with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from A Place in the Sun and becomes a film editor who discovers secret images hidden within the frames of cinema history. It is Erickson’s most accessible novel and was adapted into a 2019 film directed by James Franco.

Shadowbahn (2017) opens with the Twin Towers reappearing in the Badlands of South Dakota twenty years after 9/11. A father and daughter on a road trip encounter the towers, which emit music — American music, from Robert Johnson to Billie Holiday to the Clash. The novel is simultaneously about 9/11, about America’s relationship to its own mythology, and about a father and daughter learning to know each other.

Themes and Style

Erickson’s fiction operates in the space between literary realism and science fiction, though it belongs to neither genre. His method is essentially surrealist: he takes historical and cultural material — the American founding, the Holocaust, Hollywood, rock and roll — and subjects it to the logic of dreams, in which chronology collapses, geography warps, and the repressed returns in transformed shapes. His prose is lyrical, incantatory, and propulsive, building momentum through repetition and variation like the music that pervades his novels.

His great subject is America as a psychic landscape — a country whose founding contradictions (freedom and slavery, democracy and empire, innocence and violence) are never resolved but endlessly re-enacted.

Critical Standing

Erickson is one of the most original and underread American novelists of the past four decades. He is championed by writers (Jonathan Lethem, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell) and by a small but passionate readership, but has never achieved the commercial success of his peers. His work is too strange for mainstream literary fiction, too literary for genre, and too American for international markets. The result is a body of work that feels increasingly prophetic — his visions of American disintegration, written across decades, read differently now than when they were published.

Key Works

• Tours of the Black Clock (1989)
• Arc d’X (1993)
• The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999)
• Zeroville (2007)
• Shadowbahn (2017)

Collecting Erickson

Days Between Stations (1985, Poseidon Press, New York) — his debut — brings $25–$60 in fine first condition. Arc d’X (1993, Poseidon) brings $20–$50. Tours of the Black Clock (1989, Poseidon) brings $20–$40. All early titles are scarce in fine condition. Zeroville (2007, Europa Editions) is more widely available at $10–$25. Signed copies are uncommon; Erickson does not tour extensively.