Tours of the Black Clock

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Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1989

About the author

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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.


Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 92 votes)
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92 reviews All reviews
April 26,2025
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This is a compact book. The contents seem effortlessly written, and read like watching water flowing. There's no hardship in reading this book, apart from the contents; I won't go into details that may spoil this for you, but it's big, and I actually felt as though two books had finished by the time I was 11% into it.

The author's use of language is commendable, as it's easy to read and digest, while the characters and their inner thoughts are less palatable (to me, at least), but are so interesting, that I kept wanting more and more of the book. After half of it, interest waned, but picked up again after circa 70%.

I'll recommend this to all; it's a two-punch book, first for the use of language which I've seldom seen, and second, for the contents; the plot twists, turns, churns and is truly imaginative. Shan't say more. Go read.
April 26,2025
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Really dug this at the time. Was this the one about Hitler's pornographer? Can't remember ...
April 26,2025
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As this book slowed toward its end, I began to think of it as the opposite of a love note--a hate note--to Adolf Hitler. It appeared to be the 19th century's hateful serenade to its most hate-filled citizen. Yet further than that, this turned out to be not the case. This book is far more human than that. It is just as dark, yet just as human as "the small miserable life of an old senile memoryless man" (257).

It is as dreary as it is compelling; as seductive as watching evil suffer. It is something like Samuel Beckett and Brian Evenson and Denis Johnson in one, but it is also something all its own. A spectacular book.
April 26,2025
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An extraordinary and audacious book about the nightmare of the twentieth century, a novel of stories within stories interlocked in shapes that cannot be adequately described. A meditation on the nature of fiction, history, time, and reality itself. At the center of it all is Banning Jainlight, one of the strangest, most fascinating characters in modern fiction. A hulking man capable of extreme violence, he is at times lucid, at times deranged, and narrates with a maniacal sense of humor. Central to his story are the rise of fascism and the meaning of selling out. And his story is but one in a book that contains multitudes. A daring and surreal novel, astounding despite its flaws, that goes to some incredibly dark places and lingers in the mind.



April 26,2025
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I first read this book back in the 90s and remember reading it with only half an eye--not the book's fault: the chaos level in my life had just increased enough to make focused reading impossible. I rediscovered it in my bookcase last week and was amazed at how much of it I remembered the second I started reading. It's a tribute to the book that it made such an indelible, subconscious impression.
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