Marking the first appearance of Davenhall Island, a mysterious and isolated rock accessible to mainland America only by ferry, Tours of the Black Clock opens with the local town prostitute's son, Marc, yearning to become the next ferryman. As the island is lapped by the mystical waters of Erickson's phantom earth, the ferryman-aspirant conjures up the ghost of the improbably-named Banning Jainlight, formerly the chief pornographer of der Führer and subtle influencer of the course of Second World War history. As Jainlight relates his ethereal, creepy tale - his prewar Vienna is a cadaverous nightmare - Marc begins his circular journey through time; time that marks off the tickings of the spectral Black Clock.

Erickson's third novel - more disturbing than Rubicon Beach, if not quite as surreally inspired, and equally chaotic. Erickson has a real talent for writing fiction that propels the reader through its puzzling, tenebrous settings. Perfect reading material for snowed-in winter nights.

Nothing uplifting in this sad tale of a sad sack caught in a wrinkle of time. The story bounces around from place to place and time to time, history to alternative history. Ultimately a pretty depressing read.

Steve Erickson should be much more famous than he is, at least as famous as, say, Haruki Murakami, a writer he has a fair amount in common with, in particular Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka On The Shore. His stories are always unstuck in time and place, there is this theme that all history is happening at the same time. It's in this one, Zeroville, The Sea Came in At Midnight, Arc D'X... All his books put together in a row feel like a single epic in Erickson world, like the worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Faulkner, or even Kurt Vonnegut. And yes, there is even some Pynchon in there. After recently slogging through the Complete Stories Of Kafka, I also appreciated what a page-turner this book is. It even works if you read it like a slightly off-kilter sci-fi alternate history novel a la Man In The High Castle. Sure, let's compare him to Philip K. Dick as well. He's good.

How is Steve Erickson not regarded with the same prestige as Pynchon or Delillo?

DFW Name Drop

Ugh. Erickson, I love you but it's getting harder and harder to expose myself to the horrors and evils present in this book.

Spanning an entire era and grappling with the pivotal crises and conscience of the 20th century, this is almost overwhelming in scope and ambition, an oblique secret history / remythololizing / psychiatric case history of a world in bedlam, spun with a pulp precision belying its beautifully formed turns of phrase and piercing images. However, Erickson's reach here may exceed core coherency. The actual primary narrative is a kind of conflation of The Man in the High Castle with The Entity: parallel histories decoupled in causality but linked by a supernatural invasive force. And also: a series of men animated seemingly only by the need to trail a women, endlessly, whose hidden intimations of symmetry only give way to a kind of moebius strip, leading us... where exactly? To a women isolated on an island, abandoning and abandoned by the world, until the slurred collapse of history. Impressive and perplexing in equal measures -- perhaps the rift at the core of the 20th century can only be approached through circling its incomprehensible center of gravity through imagines and nightmares where direct access fails. And of images and nightmares, questions over answers, this novel provides many.

4.5 stars

Less enjoyable than some of Erickson's other books but no less mind-blowing. It sags in the middle but comes back around for an extremely disturbing and powerful conclusion.

This guy can do no wrong.

oh my god this is so fucking good. The bits of humor are perfect and a lot of the side characters are quite endearing.

It's not often that I say this, but I was fairly confused with this read.



The story begins with Marc, a man who has foresaken his village and mother upon discovering a dead body at her feet. He travels everyday to the village via boat, acting as a means of transportation for visitors to the island, never leaving the boat on these frequent trips. When he sees a beautiful young girl who travels on his boat to the island never to come back for the return trip, he is lured off the boat to visit his mother once again. Upon seeing her, the ghost of Banning Jainlight, the dead man at his mother's feet, returns to tell his tale.

Banning Jainlight served as a personal pornographer for Hitler during WWII, feeing the Fueher's fury and enabling his success. In his account, Hitler wins the war, partly due to Jainlight's motivation. Jainlight writes of a young girl he viewed through a window, envisioning a sorrid romance that develops between the two. At night, he has vivid erotic dreams that we find out are also shared by the young girl, Marc's mother, who lives in a reality that is more common to us, a reality where Hitler is not triumphant. These two lives and relaity operate independantly of one another, the two folding and meshing only in the coupling between Jainlight and Dania (Marc's mother). Marc is the result of this union.

It was extremely strange reading this book. It was very dreamlike and hard to pin down. Like I said before, I'm sure that I didn't get all of the meaning on my first read, but I'm not sure that I'll commit to a second reading. (AKA - I didn't like it enough to commit myself to another try).

more violent pornography than I care for but there’s also some powerful imagination at work