"The hymen of feeling worn away like innocence."

An exemplary quote for this novel, not in meaning, of course, but in its excruciating, exhausting drive to become something it can't quite be.
The plot, which has confused far better readers than me, can be broken down like this, in a like, exemplary way:
A hick with an enormous penis writes porn for Hitler and creates an alternate timeline for the niece-obsessed Fuhrer.
Now, there's a lot to read into that and a few academic people have done so with often hilarious results (the fetishization of Hitler; the fetishization of the author). I don't want to read into it because frankly I don't care. This is my third attempt to re-read, or re-tackle Erickson's works and I was again disappointed. Style aside, and the quote above should do, the plot itself was wanting. I guess if you care about Hitler's love life, you might be drawn to this work. I'm not sure what to think of that. There's an awful lot of rape and the women here are basically there to be obsessed over and used for various sexual purposes. To put it crudely and in geometrical terms, women are essentially empty shapes that the man-shape must fill, in this case a covetous Hitler and various other male characters who may or may not be related.
Like all Erickson books there is a mysterious woman in a blue dress. Strange weather. And so on.
I'll keep plowing on, though.

I read this when it was first published in 1989 and it still lingers in my mind. Steve Erickson is one of my favorite writers.

Trippy trippy book. Erotic, sadistic, perverted book. Could not put it down- can't stop reading it over and over again. (P.S. If you may be offended by a book that contains public sex, threesomes, Hitler, dead bodies, etc., then you should get over all that and read this.)

All the stars

n  I WAS A PORNOGRAPHER FOR HITLER!n

My name is Banning Jainlight. I write fiction, specially tailored fiction: pulp sex American adventure stories. I write them for a very specific clientele. These clients, these monsters, they come into my life and I enter into theirs. Am I a monster, am I their fellow monster, their comrade-in-arms? My birth was monstrous, and I dealt with my monstrous family as they deserved - monstrously, as their own monster. I fled to New York; I fled to Europe. To Hitler's Europe. And there I found myself in a world of dreams, dark dire dreams that mass alongside a dire, dark concrete reality. I make my own reality! I change this world: I let evil make a nest of it. I reach out to new worlds, better worlds.

I live in a lusciously written, extravagantly hypnotic book called Tours of the Black Clock. My fiction creates worlds and my fiction recreates a woman. I punch through time and space to be with this woman; I leave my fluids upon her, a baby within her. She dreams me and I, her.

n  n

n  A PHANTOM RAVISHED ME NIGHT AFTER NIGHT!n

My name is Dania. I lived in Africa, in Austria, on Davenhall Island. I am a dancer! I dance men to their deaths: they die when I fling myself about, spastic and free, they die and die again, they die grappling with each other, hurling themselves through windows. Men burn for me; men die at my feet.

I have a special sort of face. Perhaps not a classic beauty - but this face launches its own sort of ships. One glance at me is enough to move men, to transport them to a sentimental past, to force open windows in space and time to be with me. One such monster ravishes me, a phantom, a phantom writer. He comes to me in the night, he comes to me throughout the years, he comes in me and upon me. And sometimes he brings a friend with him: a little tyrant who lurks in the corner of the room, looking at me as if upon his own past, as if looking upon what cannot be, such a longing for me. But I am not his woman.

n  n

n  THE BLACK CLOCK TOLLS!n

But for whom do I toll? For Banning Jainlight? For Dania? For the white-haired boy Marc, that son of phantoms?

I toll for none of them and for all of them. This black clock tolls for an entire century! I move my characters in and out of history, I make a personal history a pulp story, I make the world's history a fever dream. A dream of a fever. A fever of love!

Hallucinatory prose and a circular narrative; time restarted and time disobeyed; murky motivations and characters as ciphers. A flow of strange words that progress clock-like, ever forward; a flood of words that submerges its banks; a river of words that moves backward, to its source. I am all of these things.

This black clock tolls for you, reader! I toll as you project your own desires onto the page, as you project those desires onto the faces and bodies of others. You remake history all the time, do you not? Your personal history, the history of the world with you in it; you remake history to allow yourself to survive within it. You project those dreams and they become your reality. You are both pimp and whore for those dreams. Banning Jainlight, Dania, Marc, even that sad and faithful detective Blaine, all my voices, all of my so-called protagonists... and you! You are all slaves to your dreams. Dream away! Dream it all away. Again.

n  n

Probably one of the best books I've read this year or any year for that matter...

More enamored with the idea of how temporally wonky and narratively ambitious and thematically grand this is, rather than actually enamored with the literal book itself. Partly, I'm unenthused with Erickson's largely unpoetic prose, which is stylistically stagnant throughout. Sections that warp and play with time don't do the same of language. The stretch near the end, from the conception of the insectoid hellbaby through Banning going on a miserable road-trip with Hitler (lol) is the most exciting section of the novel.

Tours of the Black Clock is an early example of the genre-bending, stylish prose that has since become emblematic of Steve Erickson. The novel jumps in and out of time, both the histories and realities that are known and recognizable, and those that are decidedly not. Erickson manages to take a well-tread portion of History, in WWII and the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, and turns it over to reveal new and strange territory. Erickson ranks amongst a unique order of fabulists.

A time-travel, multi-planes of existence whirl through history. What would the world be like had Hitler lived and Germany triumphed? A surreal, engrossing read.

This is a strange vision, but some really impressive writing. For some reason, it reminds me a little of Bolaño, but I can't really say for sure why. It has some great energy and some amazing ideas and description. I'm not sure if I would have picked this one myself, but I'm glad I read it.

A beautiful and haunting tour-de-force. Highly recommended for fans of mind-bending Borgesian surrealism. How on earth hasn't this book gotten more attention? I have no clue. I loved every word.

A sort of philosophical horror/science fantasy about a character causing time to split into two parallel streams (one where Hitler won the war in Europe, and went on to engage in a protracted war with the US, which was still on-going when the time-streams come back together).

I can't say I really "got" it.